Garden Wrap up 2014

The garden plot failed in 2014!

There is no other way to say it.  Except for the herbs which flourished until frost all the other plants in the garden were dead by the end of September.

the row of dead plants to the left are my neighbors dead sunflowers on 9-31-14
That collection of green in the middle is lettuce that reseeded in the space where the tomatoes used to be.

The creeping death moved from one plant to another and without fail turned even the healthiest plants into brown shriveled dead non-growing things.

I was unwilling to admit this and never quite finished the posts from late September that documented this death. But I have located all the photos and will update those posts in the next few weeks so others can scroll through and see what happened.

It is my opinion, based on the types of plant death that occurred and the fact that the herbs were mostly unaffected by this problem, that the soil was to blame for the issues.  The soil may have had plenty of nutrients or not, I did not have it tested once the plants started dying from diseases that were not soil quality related.  The soil was littered with several identifiable bacteria.  Check out my post on what was wrong with the tomatoes to see what I mean.

The garden plots have been traded to the City of Elmhurst to use for flood retention so will not be used in the coming year.  It is assumed we will get new areas to plant in for 2015, but I have not been informed of any locations as yet.  I am pleased that these plots are not to be used again as they were too far gone to repair and would have had to have been left fallow for a couple of years to start any possibility of repairing the soil and killing off the bacteria in the soil.

What I wanted to be able to do in 2014 was raise enough vegetables to freeze and can and be able to use them all winter and post about the process of preserving the vegetables.  However, there was never enough harvest to go beyond our personal use for the days following a harvest.  The herbs were very prolific and showed no sign of disease and I am still using the herbs I dried from the community patch.  Herbs are generally resistant to soil borne illnesses so their success only reinforced my belief that the soil was healthy in nutrients but also rampant with bacteria.

What I did learn and want to pass on as an important note is that if you have a community plot and are hoping to grow old-fashioned heirloom varieties of plants, you may want to reconsider.  Many hybrid plants were hybridized to make them more resistant to diseases that occur naturally in the soil and are hard to remove.  As a result they would have been much more resistant to the diseases that eventually killed the plants.  We grew a couple of hybrid peppers and those were the last plants to die in the garden.

jalapenos still producing on 9-31-14

The cucumber was the most damaged by soil issues and the sheer number of bugs the garden had because of the previous winter.  Squash and melon, all grown from heirloom seed, were the first to show signs of problems.

The various beans did okay but did not continue to produce after an initial harvest.  We were able to save enough seed that we can probably grow more next year.  The tomatoes were slow and had damaged fruit, but probably would have lived longer and produced more except for the incredibly wet weather we experienced.  The soil was not dry enough for them and their root systems and they eventfully rotted from the bottom up.

dead sunflowers

The sunflowers just died within days of reaching flowering stage.  They were beautiful one week and dead the next.

The zinnias, grown from seed, did very well, but the bugs did make finding a perfect bloom hard.  The dahlias never flowered.  The calendula, however, flowered until frost and I harvested hundreds of petals to use in tea.

The yellow flowers along the front are calenula

Weekly update - August 17

This week we continued to weed and harvest and water a bit, but there has been plenty of rain here recently, almost too much.  Everything is still looking very green and the tomatoes are ripening as we have had some warmer nights.

Looking to the east

Things are still very contained, even the herbs are staying somewhat separated from each other.

Looking to the west

The Kohlrabi I used to replace the lettuce is growing well.  If the small bugs that are eating the leaves on everything don't get tot them they should do rather well and give me a late September root crop.  Since we never planted carrots because we ran out of room this will be a nice item to go with the Celery root (Celeriac) that will mature around the same time.

The Zinnias were the happiest of plants int he garden this week.  As you can see they are covered with blooms.

The Calendula that I planted from seed along the front edge of the garden late in the season has come up well and is going into continuous bloom mode.  As soon as I clip off a flower others come to take there place.  This mix has two shades of lowers An orange that is like a pumpkin color and a red and yellow that looks almost like a straw flower.  So far not a single yellow bloom in the bunch.

I have so many calendula about to pop that I think I will need to plan to use them this fall in something special at the Backyard Patch.

The dwarf sunflowers are flowering and the heads are getting heavy and turning toward the ground.

My sunflowers are only about 2 feet tall.  But a few of the other gardeners in the community patch has full-sized sunflowers like these beauties.

There are signs of trouble in the garden however. Here is the climbing burpless cucumber vine and you can see the bug holes in the leaves and the dried and discolored leaves on the plant.  I am not sure if it is vertasiliam wilt, which I know is in the soil or the fungus from the potato bugs that I know have been plaguing these plants since they got about 2 inches tall.  Either way the bugs and diseases are winning.

Musk Melon

A mold called powdery mildew, has also formed on all the squash plants including the acorn squash and the zucchini.

After the great harvest we had previously the plant now struggles to produce one zucchini at a time.

My melon which was slow to germinate and slow to prosper is covered with this same powdery mildew.

Acorn Squash also has yellowing and drying leaves

Zucchini

 The herbs, however, are doing very well.  The thyme is in need of harvesting, but I forgot the paper bags, so I will do it next time I visit. The Dill and fennel have already started to produce seed.  I have decided to let them go to seed as I have other plants so I can save the seed for next year as I will lose all these plants at the end of the season when the community garden shuts down. Even after harvesting them last week they have grown and filled back in like they were hardly cut.

Silver thyme

Looking to the east (rather bright because of sun angle at 8 PM)

Looking to the west Mint int he foreground trimmed back so you can see the tri color sage.

In the next few weeks I will harvest these again, allowing some of the calendula as well as the bronze fennel go to seed and perhaps the oregano and savory as well so I can save the seed from those plants which did very well this season.