The Planted Community Garden - Sunday May 24, 2015

This year we suffered from over-purchase syndrome.  That affliction where you buy more plants than will fit in your space.  That linked with the fact the plot at the end is actually smaller than it is supposed to be, something I had not planned for, made our original plan will not work out quite right.

Here is the plot, a bit weedy due to the fact we did not come out until May 24, due to the days of rain. We first removed the grass and used the hand tiller to break up the soil and remove the large weeds from the garden edge.

You can see the hand tiller to the left in this picture.  It is a pole with three curved claws at the bottom.  You place it in the ground and twist and it brings out weeds and breaks up soil.  You can see the original plan I posted back on May. I put in the paths and measured off the garden and that was when I discovered the the plan was not going to work.

We were not able to put in three long beds and two short, instead we got two long beds on the sides and three short beds down the middle  We planted tomatoes in one long bed as planned but it was shorter than it should have been so all the plants did not fit and we had to put the plants a bit closer together.

We purchased too many peppers and planted them into two beds leaving us with only one small bed for everything else and one long bed for the herbs.  I think I am going to have to sacrifice at least part of the herb bed for more vegetables, as the kohlrabi, broccoli, beans and squash cannot possibly fit in the last bed.  We lost the time for growing lettuce because of the heavy rains in May so we will try that experiment later in the season.

I will be growing some of the herbs in containers and will be planting onions and shallots in between the peppers. I will need to wait until the first week of June as it rained for five days straight starting with the evening of the day we planted these plants.  That rain and the effect of cold weather on the plants will be covered next week.

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.

Weekly update - August 11 Preserving Herbs

This week in the garden we were weeding and harvesting herbs.  There were some other vegetables, but with cooler nights they are growing more slowly, while the herbs were enjoying the extra rain and some previous trimming to sprout out with lots of new growth.

You can see how the herbs have spread and grown together.  In a couple of cases you have to move one plant aside to see another.

The tomatoes are still producing, but not has fast or as much as we would like.

The sunflower blooms have finally begun to open. and the Zinnias are blooming in a riot.

These are a dwarf variety that stands no more than 3 feet tall, so you look down at, rather than up at the blooms.




The calendula I planted from seed late in the spring is reaching blooming stage.  The first flower appeared this week.  Considering I kneeled on them and raked them when they were seedlings, forgetting I planted them along the front edge of the garden, they are doing rather well.

We needed to tie up the grape and cherry tomatoes as the branches have outgrown the first two sets of ties.

The Kohlrabi is moving beyond leafy branches to producing a bulb at the base.  They should be ready to harvest in late September.  They generally only need 8 weeks of growth to be able to harvest so we might actually be able to dig them sooner.

The broccoli rabe is still producing.  And we got one large zucchini this week to add the mountain of them from last week.

After surveying the garden I decided that while hubby watered I could get most of the herbs  harvested which would set the plants up for even better harvest in the next few weeks.

Once I cut herbs and brought them home I found that there were stowaways on the fennel.  This Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar came home with me.  I gave him the fennel and we will see if he becomes a butterfly!

Harvesting  / Preserving Herbs

Here is the harvesting basket this week.  The tomatoes and zucchini are on the bottom and then I filled in over them with herbs.  Since next week I will cut a few sunflowers, I thought this week I would cutthe zinnias for the vase int eh kitchen.

The dill went to seed weeks ago, due to the heat spell we had.  I did not do what I normally do with dill which is seed a row every two weeks to give me a continuous crop of dill weed.  I have that in the regualr herb garden so i just planted one plant here and decided I would harvest the seeds for pickling as they ripened.

Here is a photo identifying most of  the herbs in the basket.

I took the savory, mints and lemon balm and bundled them and hung them to dry.  You just pull of the leaves off the bottom of the stems, then bind the stems with a rubberband.  Then I loop the band over the arms or base of a hanger and hang them out of the sun in a place with good air circulation.

Always remember to label your herbs, because one plants looks the same as another once they are dry. (The herbs in front are lemon balm)

Here are the herbs after a week of drying (this is spearmint.)


I also dry herbs on trays of plates.  I have a plate stand (the kind you use for confections and tea service.  I place old plates on it and line them with paper towel.  I spread out the smaller herbs or loose leaves on those to dry.

Thyme with its tiny, thin stems cannot be bundled.  But it drys very easily, so I toss the thyme into a brown paper lunch bag with the variety of thyme written on the outside and stack them, open ends out to the room, on a shelf.  In a week the thyme is dry and I can transfer it to a jar and refill the paper bags.

Once you have dried the herbs until they crumble in your hand,  can take two weeks or more if it is humid, less if it is not. The you are ready to strip them from the stems and place them in storage jars.

fresh cut savory spread on towels on a plate

Dried savory ready to be stripped

stripped and ready for storage

In addition to drying the herbs for later use.  I also made some herbal vinegar.  This is one of the simplest and best ways to preserve the fresh herb flavors. There was not much tarragon, so I decided the best way to capture it was to craft a vinegar.  Tarragon is a great complement to wine vinegar.  With other herbs I use a plain distilled white vinegar.

tarragon in white wine vinegar

For details on how to make herbal vinegar, check out this how to post.

We also used some of the herbs fresh.  Here is a fruit salad with mojito mint ribbons.

Here is the herb garden and some of the other garden after we finished harvesting and weeding.  You can see how much more tame the herbs are now.

weekly update - August 4 Art in the garden

Chas is always jumping in to water before I get any work done in the garden and this week was no exception.  We did not get much rain this week, so as a result the weeds are more tame.

looking from left to right

I was feeling rather artsy as I took pictures this week.  Besides there was no weeding to do so I had some time on my hands as he hogged the watering wand.  Here are a few close ups of the plants:

A single sunflower, but more are on the way!

Christmas Lima Bean pods, not beans yet

Zinnias (the flower of the Men's Garden Club of Villa Park)

Traditional Hyssop pollinators love it!

mustard seed

Celeriac or root celery

Calendula

Artful watering!

A look at the thyme bed

Weekly update - July 20

Now you can really see a difference in the garden from last month to this month. The beans are growing up the trellis, the cucumbers have covered their  trellis and the herbs have doubled in size even with harvesting.  the nice neat patch of greens has turned into a tall unruly collection that shades the remaining lower growing greens protecting them from summer heat and giving me a longer harvest. And the tomato plants have filled in their cages and are starting to produce fruit.

JUNE

JULY

This week I focused on watering the garden as needed and weeding the herb garden.  Herbs compete well against weeds, so I tend to weed them last, plus I can enjoy the scents and fragrance while weeding so it is my favorite part of the task.  I always weed the rest of the garden first as a result.

I started with the raised bed of thyme.  Weeding thyme is a chose, as the thick mat of branches and leaves on the plants hid weeds well and reaching in to removed the plants at the base can be difficult.  As a result i weed the thyme bed every time I visit the garden.  It takes about 2 minutes to putt the dozen or so plants that stick up in and around the thyme, but it keeps them from taking root and becoming harder to pull later.

You can see how they plants are spreading into one another which is my favorite look.  You notice the variation in leaf shape along with flower and stem color more when they are closer together.

Progress

The zinnias are now blooming.  I took way to many pictures of this.

The lemon basil has started producing
seed heads which are hard to contain
on this smaller leaf basil plant.

You have to clip off the seed heads on
basil as soon as you see them.  Once
they put energy into seed production
the flavor and quality of the leaves
deteriorates.

As a result I now carry the scissors and
snip off the tops of all the basil plants during
each visit to the garden. It gives me a fist full
of leaves I can use in tonight's salad or main dish.




Overall we are in waiting mode.  The plants are just about ready to begin producing items we can harvest in larger abundance.  Just one more week and I will start getting more than one tomato at a time and a handful of beans.