Community Garden Plot Update

In the foreground here you can see the bean trellis I was trying to describe in an earlier post.  It consists of two bamboo teepees from last year with a crossbar running between their tops.  Bird netting is wrapped over the crossbar and extends down to the ground, where it is staked to the middle of the bean bed.  There is too much excess netting at the ground, it makes it impossible to use the hoe inside the bed.  Next time I will hang it with the excess at the top.  (If you've never used bird netting, trying not to snag it is like N trying to avoid poison ivy - you'd swear it moves around when you're not looking.)  All but one or two of the lima beans were eaten in their infancy by some sort of rodent, so I replanted the lima bean section with regular green beans, and they're doing well though they're still pretty small.  Most of the plants have little flowers on them now, so hopefully there will be way too many green beans soon.

My cucumbers are starting to produce; I made a jar of refrigerator pickles with the first round of pickings and am hoping to get a few more pounds this week to do a batch for storage.  They don't seem to be climbing as well as in my garden at home, and since I planted several varieties I'm wondering if that's because they get better light here?  I've seen cucumber beetles in there, too, and a few leaves have wilted mysteriously, so I'm worried the bugs will be spreading some sort of disease.  I'd still prefer not to use a pesticide, though, since I work in there with A in a baby carrier and R runs around helping me find bugs, dig holes, and pick things

The corn is getting quite tall and the tassles (the pollen-shedding part at the top) are open on a few of the plants.  Suddenly I remember that I used to be allergic to corn pollen...wonder how that will turn out?

I'll update you on the progress of the other crops later!

Garden Update

I was just sniffing around the garden blogosphere and realized I'm not the only slacker who's gotten too busy with spring craziness to keep her blog up-to-date!  Here's some of what's going on:

1) R and I transplanted basil, dill, and eggplants into our home garden plot.  I have completely abandoned the original planting plan in favor of just getting things in the ground quickly.
2) The azalea bushes and irises are in bloom.
3) The potatoes are up in my backyard container as well as in my community garden plot, which was planted almost three weeks later.  (They're a little smaller.)
4) The first planting of peas are more than a foot tall.
5) Both of my gardens are covered in little sprouted weeds.
6) N came out to the community garden plot with me last week and helped me move a bunch more compost from the pile out there onto my plot, and turned over the soil in the zucchini bed.  I'm ready to plant the corn and put out some tomatoes, I think.  (More on tomatoes in a second post.)  We've had an odd spring, with lots of thunderstorms and cold weather, and geese still flying overhead even yesterday, so I've been a little reluctant, but the rush of all the spring stuff blooming lately makes me feel like it's time.
7) Also a couple weeks ago N brought two of last year's been teepees out to the community plot and we set them up at either end of what will be the bean bed.  From a distance it makes my plot look as though someone who knows what they're doing is working in there!  And, none of our recent thunderstorms have been able to knock them over, so that's good.
8) My neighbor at the community garden set up a fantastic fence around his three plots, with a neat little gate and everything.  He took down the pieces of small plastic fence that I'd stretched along that side of my plot to keep R out of his cauliflower, and rolled them neatly around my fence posts.  What a sweetie!
9) I'm still debating about how to stake my tomtoes.  I've been hearing a lot of good things about the "florida weave" method lately, but the upfront costs are awfully high.  You need a 7- or 8-foot metal T-post for every two or three plants (I think I could get away with 6 of them at about $8 apiece).  It's true that you can reuse them for many seasons, but I've told myself that about the staking methods I used for the last three years and here I sit, debating trying something new, again...
10) The strawberry flowers have opened and are just starting to turn down.  I'm in a hurry for them this year because I feel like I need to pick them before I go into labor or we might miss the whole season in post-baby sleep deprivation.
11) Lots of flower buds are forming on my unruly raspberry vines.  I hope we get to eat a few raspberries this year!
12) My spinach is starting to grow upward, letting me know its time is limited.  The seeds I planted this spring are still tiny, which makes me think I may not get anything out of them before the heat hits.  We'll see!

Hmm, I think that's it for now.  I'm going to try to get an updated photo of the community garden this week, which - despite the fact that I haven't planted anything in there except one short row of potatoes - is starting to look like a real garden!

Bean Teepee Lesson Learned

Last spring when Nick was preparing to construct bamboo teepees for my bean vines to climb, he asked me how tall he should make them. I lifted my hand above my head as far as I could comfortably reach and said, "About to here." When my neighbor got a look at these monstrous creations he looked at me skeptically and said that he thought beans only grew a few feet tall. Since I had ordered seeds for "King of the Garden" lima beans, advertised to grow to 8-10 feet, I was pretty sure the teepees were not too tall. Later, when I realized that there isn't quite as much light shining on my new garden plot as I had hoped, I was really glad these things are so tall and the plants are such good climbers, since it gives them a chance to soak up an extra 1/2 hour or so of sunshine.

Here's what I didn't count on: the place where we joined the poles together is about where I can comfortably reach, but some of the bamboo poles extend a good two feet higher than that, and for some reason the vines think that's just as good a place as any to grow a whole bunch of bean pods. Lesson learned.

Teepee Staking and Watering

Nick staked this bean teepee down for me. I'm planning to plant the beans this weekend, so I'm happy to see that we have a credible way of doing this now.

Last night R helped me water the seeds that haven't come up yet. His idea of helping is mostly just sticking his hand underneath my drippy old sprayer and flinching at the resulting spray.

Bean Teepee

Check out this awesome support N built for my string beans! It is tall enough that I can just reach the point where it's lashed, so he won't have to pick them for me unless they get really, really tall. He made it from bamboo that we collected at the University of Maryland campus. There was a very large stand of bamboo that's been spreading at least as long as I've been here (6 years now!) and a student group is trying to cut it all down and replace it with native species. Good luck to them! We got enough for several teepees. I'm planning to grow string and lima beans on them.
In the background you can see the new garden bed is finished. I covered it first in cardboard, then in compost. I've been collecting the cardboard for a couple of months now. It is all used, with minimal markings on it. The compost is about 30% stuff that I made and 70% stuff that was made by the city of College Park. I'm also planning to collect a 5-gallon bucket of coffee grounds from the local Starbucks and put that in to help break down the cardboard.