Going into this growing season I was so excited to be growing an abundance of vegetables and herbs for sale, but as the season has progressed it has become clear to me that my lack of planning has mostly ruined the hope of growing much more than what my husband and I will eat this year. It has been a learning experience, and it has prepared me for a much more productive and abundant season next year. Now I know what I did wrong and what I can do better, and I would really love to be able to create a small CSA next year.
The garden is still looking great, and I have begun to harvest things like cabbage, fingerling potatoes, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, and broccoli. The tomato plants are lush and healthy, and many are loaded with perfect, beautiful (but still green!) fruits. I have eaten maybe 3 ripe cherry tomatoes.
Last week I planted a cold-weather succession of kale, radishes, turnips, kohlrabi, bok choy, spinach, collards, lettuce, salad mix, and peas, along with the rest of the gladiolas I found in the garden center's dumpster. They are already sprouting! There is a harvest festival with a farmers' market next month on the reservation and I plan to participate in that since I will most likely have quite a few tomatoes, squash, herbs, and potatoes on my hands. So it's possible I will still make some money on my efforts this year. Really it doesn't matter that much to me because I love farming and I would do it for free.
Grasshoppers have descended upon the garden en masse. Practically everywhere I step in the garden, a cloud of grasshoppers jumps out of my way. They don't seem to be doing much damage to the crops, though. They have nibbled a bit on my leeks and they ravaged all of my mint and maybe a couple of parsley plants that had been suffocated by weeds anyway, but they have mostly avoided the tomatoes, squash, peas, potatoes, and basil, which are the plants that make up the bulk of the garden. Cabbage loopers have made swiss cheese of my cabbage plants, but a few heads survived so we shredded one and put it on our lamb tacos. I'm not a huge cabbage fan anyway, so I let the cabbage serve as a trap crop to keep the cabbage loopers, who will eat any plant in the Brassica family, away from the brassicas I like better, like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi.
I sort of dropped the ball when it came to the application of 501, the biodynamic preparation made of ground quartz which is sprayed on the leaves of growing crops to facilitate their absorption and utilization of sunlight. I didn't realize that it is supposed to be sprayed when the plants are still young and small, and I had been putting it off until I could remove more weeds from the garden (the weeds got pretty bad, but since my hours have been cut back at work I have been spending a lot more time in the garden and cleaning it up). So I have decided to wait until the fall succession plants are a bit larger and then I will spray the whole garden. The instructions say to spray crops when they have about 3 true leaves. The true leaves are the ones that look like the leaves of the mature plant and do not include the cotyledons. Cotyledons are the first "leaves" to appear when a seed sprouts--some plants have one and some have two, depending on the species. The instructions also say that 501 can be applied when insects or disease have ravaged a leaf crop, and that it will help the plant heal itself. Unfortunately I didn't read that part until last week, so I guess my cabbage plants have suffered unnecessarily.
Oh yeah, one successful experiment I tried this summer was with alternative potato hilling materials. Potatoes are typically grown in hills, and as they grow taller, you can mound the dirt higher and cover up more of the plant to facilitate the growth of more potatoes. Their above-ground parts can be easily converted to below-ground, potato-making parts just by covering them up. When I planted the potatoes, I covered them with 6-inch hills. But I wasn't sure I would have enough topsoil to make the hills larger with dirt, so I purchased 4 bales of straw and covered all the potato plants with a few inches of the straw. Then, when the weeds were getting so crazy, I started piling them on top of the potato plants instead of hauling them to the compost pile. I tried to only do this in the earlier part of the day, and on dry days, so that the weeds would dry out instead of rotting and creating disease-friendly conditions. Also, I only used weeds that had not yet gone to seed, since weed seeds are the last things I want to put on the crops. This method has worked great, and it has helped retain water in the sandy soil of the garden.
The garden is still looking great, and I have begun to harvest things like cabbage, fingerling potatoes, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, and broccoli. The tomato plants are lush and healthy, and many are loaded with perfect, beautiful (but still green!) fruits. I have eaten maybe 3 ripe cherry tomatoes.
Last week I planted a cold-weather succession of kale, radishes, turnips, kohlrabi, bok choy, spinach, collards, lettuce, salad mix, and peas, along with the rest of the gladiolas I found in the garden center's dumpster. They are already sprouting! There is a harvest festival with a farmers' market next month on the reservation and I plan to participate in that since I will most likely have quite a few tomatoes, squash, herbs, and potatoes on my hands. So it's possible I will still make some money on my efforts this year. Really it doesn't matter that much to me because I love farming and I would do it for free.
Grasshoppers have descended upon the garden en masse. Practically everywhere I step in the garden, a cloud of grasshoppers jumps out of my way. They don't seem to be doing much damage to the crops, though. They have nibbled a bit on my leeks and they ravaged all of my mint and maybe a couple of parsley plants that had been suffocated by weeds anyway, but they have mostly avoided the tomatoes, squash, peas, potatoes, and basil, which are the plants that make up the bulk of the garden. Cabbage loopers have made swiss cheese of my cabbage plants, but a few heads survived so we shredded one and put it on our lamb tacos. I'm not a huge cabbage fan anyway, so I let the cabbage serve as a trap crop to keep the cabbage loopers, who will eat any plant in the Brassica family, away from the brassicas I like better, like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi.
I sort of dropped the ball when it came to the application of 501, the biodynamic preparation made of ground quartz which is sprayed on the leaves of growing crops to facilitate their absorption and utilization of sunlight. I didn't realize that it is supposed to be sprayed when the plants are still young and small, and I had been putting it off until I could remove more weeds from the garden (the weeds got pretty bad, but since my hours have been cut back at work I have been spending a lot more time in the garden and cleaning it up). So I have decided to wait until the fall succession plants are a bit larger and then I will spray the whole garden. The instructions say to spray crops when they have about 3 true leaves. The true leaves are the ones that look like the leaves of the mature plant and do not include the cotyledons. Cotyledons are the first "leaves" to appear when a seed sprouts--some plants have one and some have two, depending on the species. The instructions also say that 501 can be applied when insects or disease have ravaged a leaf crop, and that it will help the plant heal itself. Unfortunately I didn't read that part until last week, so I guess my cabbage plants have suffered unnecessarily.
Oh yeah, one successful experiment I tried this summer was with alternative potato hilling materials. Potatoes are typically grown in hills, and as they grow taller, you can mound the dirt higher and cover up more of the plant to facilitate the growth of more potatoes. Their above-ground parts can be easily converted to below-ground, potato-making parts just by covering them up. When I planted the potatoes, I covered them with 6-inch hills. But I wasn't sure I would have enough topsoil to make the hills larger with dirt, so I purchased 4 bales of straw and covered all the potato plants with a few inches of the straw. Then, when the weeds were getting so crazy, I started piling them on top of the potato plants instead of hauling them to the compost pile. I tried to only do this in the earlier part of the day, and on dry days, so that the weeds would dry out instead of rotting and creating disease-friendly conditions. Also, I only used weeds that had not yet gone to seed, since weed seeds are the last things I want to put on the crops. This method has worked great, and it has helped retain water in the sandy soil of the garden.
