A Week Worth of Neglect

Overgrown zucchini and an eaten ear of corn.

Last week my sister was talking to me about how her garden got so overrun with weeds during her recent vacation that she almost decided to give up for the year.  (You wouldn't believe how common that is right about now.)  "You can't garden on your free days," she said.  And that about sums it up.  During my recent vacation I lost another summer squash plant and two winter squash vines to the squash bugs, weeds absolutely overtook the last couple cucumber vines, and raccoons (or squirrels?) ate all but a few of my remaining corn ears.  Plus my zucchini got a little bigger than I like!

Lest you think my garden brings me nothing but grief, check out some of the corn we ate for lunch before we left:

We also took a few squash, a baggie of garlic, a basil plant (I potted it from my home garden) and a half a box of tomatoes with us.  What a tasty trip!

Corn!

I've never grown corn before, and only did it on a whim this year when I found I had so much space in my community garden plot that I couldn't imagine what I would do with all the food it was likely to produce. (I know, I know, I have a limited imagination - the bounty of 10 tomato plants is simply beyond my ken!) Anyway, I wasn't expecting much, especially because I only had room for 2 rows and you are supposed to plant at least 4 to get good pollination rates. (For anyone curious about corn pollination - And hey, who isn't? Corn is a neat plant! - there is a good article from Purdue University called "Sex in the Cornfield: How It's Done".)

Last Sunday N and I drove over to the community garden and picked our first batch of corn, and found pretty mixed results. The pollination seems to have gone well, but 4 of the 7 ears we picked had earworms of earworm damage, and the ears were smaller than I generally buy at the store. But then again, one of them was just perfect. Naturally I'm already thinking about where to plant more next year.

Corn earworm damage on one of my ears.

Almost Done Planting?

I keep thinking I'm almost done planting things at the community garden (and at home!) but then it always seems like there's room for a few more things.  Here's another update on the progress out there.

My potatoes are doing quite well.  Most of the chunks I planted have sprouted at least one plant, and the plants now range in size from about 2 inches (the one I chopped off by accident with a hoe) to about 2 ft above the original soil line.  I've never grown potatoes in the ground before, so when N saw me hilling them up and started asking skeptical questions, I don't think my voice quite had the ring of authority he wanted to hear.  He went and chatted with M, our community garden's helpful guru, who told him I should actually be hilling them even higher.  Suitably reassured, N proceeded to do a much nicer job of it than I had been.  (He really wants potatoes to come out of that garden!)

The tomatoes I transplanted a few weeks ago are doing really well - they've almost doubled their above-ground size since I planted them and several are starting to flower.  As an experiment I decided to cover the ground around them with the plastic bags my leafgro arrived in.  I've seen advice on several university extension websites about mulching tomatoes with plastic to conserve water, suppress weeds, and prevent potentially spore-laden soil from splashing up onto the leaves during heavy rainfall.  So far I have to say I'm really impressed; the soil around my tomato beds is visibly more moist than in other areas of the garden, and the upper leaves (those that grew in after I put the plastic down) are visibly cleaner than the older ones.  Yay!  Now I really must get to staking!

My corn (some of it anyway) has come up.  I think I'll have to go back sometime soon and re-plant in the places where it didn't come up.  I didn't do a very good job of watering it after I planted, or of mixing together the soil and the leaf mulch I put on top of it, so I guess I deserved poor germination rates, but it's important that my rows be filled in, since I only planted two rows and pollination is really important for corn.

I haven't seen any beans (green beans and lima beans) or cucumbers yet.  N helped me put up a trellis for the cucumbers and a net for the beans.  I'll have to post pictures because the whole bean structure is kind of hard to describe and I've already gotten questions about it from several other gardeners out there.  I always laugh a little when people ask what it's for, because I have no idea if it will work and I know it looks crazy.  I needed something around 6 or 7 feet tall and roughly 15 feet long and costing almost nothing to make - surely the kind of challenge that requires a creative and unique solution.  We'll see if it works, I guess.

I also planted pre-sprouted zucchini and butternut squash seeds, and a few yellow summer squash seeds that weren't sprouted yet - I just wanted to get them in the ground in case the baby comes.  (Any day now....) 

As it turns out I have a big blank spot in my community garden plan that was originally intended to be part of a shaded seating / water collection area.  My thinking was that in July when it's 100 degrees and 100% humidity it would be nice to have some shady spot to sit in and nurse the baby between gardening chores.  But there were a lot of problems with that plan, too numerous to mention at 11pm.  I also just happen to have a bunch of old seeds for large vining plants, given to me by my friend T because she doesn't have the space to grow them and wasn't really sure if the seeds were any good.  So, I may be adding some pumpkins and/or winter squash to my plot, depending on how much time passes between now and when the baby arrives.  I've recently discovered the seemingly obvious fact that garden space that has nothing planted in it still has to be weeded, so I am motivated to at least make it all useful!