The Indecisive Gardener

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , /by

How to Make Decisions in Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

Making decisions about where to plant things in the garden is one of my biggest challenges.  Hard to imagine when I spend most of my time in other people’s gardens. But because I rent, my own garden is a blank slate.  And that makes it really hard for me to know what to plant where. I know what the plants need but I can’t decide who should live next to whom or even make simple decisions about succession planting.

If you’re an indecisive gardener, whether you’re a new gardener and aren’t sure where things go, or because like me there are so many possibilities you just can’t decide, here are a couple strategies I use:

Vegetables
Square Foot Gardening is the friend of new and indecisive gardeners.  You can just make the garden squares and plant whatever happens to be in your hand at the moment.  Mel Bartholomew who invented the idea of square foot gardening has simplified plant spacing in his latest refinements of the process.  Each square is still a 12-inch square.  Little plants go 16 to a square, medium plants 9 to a square. Large plants 4 to a square and really large plants 1 to a square.  I can just fill a square and move on to the next square.  Hardly any decisions except to remember to put the tomatoes to the back of the garden where they don’t block the sun. http://www.squarefootgardening.org/#!__top10faqs/vstc20=page-4/vstc100=gardening

 Herbs
I love herbs but worry about where to put them so they are in the right conditions and so that the perennials ones survive without taking over. In my mind, I divide the herbs into categories: Mediterranean herbs (thyme, rosemary, oregano), invasive herbs (mint, lemon balm), and tender herbs (basil).

 Mediterranean herbs go in the hottest driest part of the garden with more sun and not so much water because the flavors of these herbs are best if they aren’t pampered with too much good water and soil.  Invasive herbs go next to concrete…either a wall or a sidewalk….somewhere there is a natural limit to how far they can spread. Tender herbs go in the vegetable garden.

 Perennials
These are the most difficult ones to decide on. Many a perennial has languished in its tight pot waiting for me to decide where to put it.  I learned from another indecisive gardener that the perfect place is a “Nursery Bed.”  The nursery bed is for the plants that are young and need extra attention and for the ones that don’t yet have a home in a permanent bed.  They’ll eventually graduate to the grown-up garden, but now they at least have a home in the ground in the nursery bed where they get some extra attention too.

 Don’t let the desire to have a perfect garden or the fear of making a mistake keep you from having a great garden.  Set some simple rules like these. And if that doesn’t work…then the whole yard can be the “nursery bed!” 

 

Photo Credits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_foot_gardening

http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/what-can%E2%80%99t-you-decide/attachment/indecisive/

 

 

Why I Love Ice and Freezing Rain in April

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Benefits of Freezing Rain

by Sandy Swegel

 

Last week was just beautiful and a bit unseasonably warm for Colorado.  Everybody started gardening and doing spring cleanups and setting out Wall of Waters for their tomatoes.

Then yesterday was a cold drizzling rain that turned to snow and then ice as temperatures dropped.

And I’m really happy about that.

The reality is that we’re in Zone 5 and our last frost date isn’t until May 15th.  So we are due for more cold freezing temperatures.  For gardeners, spring freezes are heartbreaking because it kills the blossoms on the fruit trees….which means no fruit. Last year a late freeze meant we had virtually no apples, peaches or cherries.  Very sad.

So yesterday’s forecast for temps in the 20s could wipe out our fruit again this year.

That’s where freezing rain saves us. 

First, the rain gets everything wet.  Then the rain starts freezing around the little flower buds on the fruit trees.  More cold rain falls and makes a bigger ice crystal around each bud.  Soon the buds are entirely encased in ice.  That means that while the air temperature may have gone to 23 degrees last night there are good chance buds protected in 32-degree ice crystals were safe and will live to bear fruit.  The insulating effects of freezing water are well known in the orchard industry where citrus growers set off sprinklers over the fruit trees when the impending freeze is coming.

Others may curse the ice-slicked streets and frozen windshields today after enjoying 70 sunny days last week.  But I’m delighted.  I see hope for a bumper apple crop.

 

Photo credit:  http://blogs.woodtv.com/files/2012/03/ice-on-peach-blossoms.jpg

 

 

Why Gardeners Should Get A CSA Share

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Community Supported Agriculture

by Sandy Swegel

 

You’ve heard about CSAs by now.  Community Supported Agriculture is a system where you pay one flat rate for a weekly share of food from a local farm.  It’s a great plan that gives farmers a guaranteed basic income and gives you access to good local food.

 


“But I have a vegetable garden, why should buy a CSA?”

 


You’ll become a better gardener and a better cook that’s why. 

 


When you get a CSA share, you not only get a box of vegetables, you get a relationship with a farmer.  If you pick up on the farm, here’s what you can learn:

 

Succession planning. If you pick up on the farm or read your farm’s blog, you’ll see that every week, farmers are doing something new…starting new seed, planting cover crop, letting chickens run on a fallow area, pulling out bolted lettuces.  CSA farmers know how to get the max output from the most efficient input. You can learn a lot by going home to your garden and doing what they did.

 

You’ll learn to love vegetables you thought you hated.
Every year you buy seeds based on your own long-held ideas of what tastes good.  If it weren’t for a CSA I would never have learned that turnips are exquisite.  I didn’t like turnips as a child.  Even growing turnips I’d pick them when it was hot so they had already become a bit bitter. But our CSA harvested turnips young and tender, refrigerated them and sliced thinly.  They were beautiful and crunchy and make an awesome Middle-eastern style pickle.

 

You have a free garden consultant.
If you linger at the farm towards the end of pickup or go to farm-day picnics for CSA members, you can bring all of your garden questions and get expert tips on how to grow better or how to deal organically with pests.

 

You’ll learn new ways to cook and prepare foods.
Most CSAs have newsletters with recipes for the week’s food share.  You’ll get menu ideas and learn cooking techniques you hadn’t thought of.  And you’ll learn about vegetables in a new way.  Maybe you just grow your favorite tomato, but you’ll learn that a sauce made just of yellow tomatoes gives an entirely different flavor and texture experience.

 

You’ll eat more vegetables.
The only problem with CSAs is that you get a lot of food.  It can feel like a chore at first to have to prepare so much food from scratch.  But you want your money’s worth so soon you’ll schedule all that fresh food processing into your week.  Vegetables rather than processed foods and meats become the focal point of your diet.

 

Photo Credit http://tinyfarmblog.com/tag/csa-share/

Tweaking Your Tomatoes

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Try These Two Tomato Growing Tips

by Sandy Swegel

The harvest season is going strong and it’s a good time to look around and notice what garden “tweaks” might have worked this year.  By tweaks I mean the new techniques I might have tried, or tips my neighbors gave me or even changes in location, sun or water.  Tomatoes are pretty much the most important crop in the home garden, at least from the perspective of pride and bragging rights.

Because I help several of my clients with their gardens, I have the advantage of being able to compare techniques in different locations under different conditions.  You can do this in your own garden by doing “controls” like in a science experiment.  You plant some plants in a new way and some plants like you always have.  Here are two tweaks I tried this year that were wildly successful and are now part of “How I Grow Tomatoes.”

BIG HOLE. Wider and Deeper. I’ve always know tomatoes needed a big hole with compost and manure.  This year I was really worried about two different gardens…one was a new garden on not great soil and one was an established garden where the tomatoes didn’t do very well at all last year.  What I did, made the biggest strongest earliest tomatoes I have ever grown.

The holes were big…at least a five-gallon pot size. I always think I dig a big hole, but this time I made sure that a five-gallon pot could fit in the hole before I pronounced it big enough.  I filled the hole halfway with compost and composted manure and then mixed in some soil. At the base of the hole, I spread a huge handful of Alpha One Organic Fertilizer full of blood meal, bone meal, cottonseed meal and alfalfa meal. I filled the hole with water. I removed all but two or three of the transplant’s leaves and planted it up to its neck and filled in with the soil compost mix.  I drenched everything with water again. It looked pretty goofy – such a big hole for two leaves – but the eight tomatoes in each location that I planted like this loved having their roots directly in such a well-fed pre-watered environment.  Control tomatoes where I put equivalent amounts of food mixed in the soil in general or on the surface did well, but not as amazingly well.  I don’t think this would work with synthetic fertilizer because the roots might burn.  More food, more loose soil for air and more water to penetrate, all paid off.

Break the Soil Fungus and Disease Cycle. Lots of tomato diseases last year and a wet spring mean a lot of diseases this year.  I learned that fungi overwinter in the soil and then spread to the plant when rain or water splashes soil up to the leaves.  Early in the season when the tomato plant was small, I kept the soil surface covered with dry grass clippings or newspaper.  As soon as the plant was a couple feet tall, I started pulling off lower leaves so the bottom six to eight inches of the stem was bare.  I kept mulching low and dry on the surface. Keeping the leaves trimmed up and not letting foliage from higher up fall over, kept the air flowing too. These plants had fewer fungus problems than control tomatoes.

The other ruthless thing I did was change my attitude of letting a sickly looking plant stay for another week to see if it improved.  With tomato viruses and bacterial blights rampant this year, I planted more tomato plants than I needed and immediately yanked any plant that showed classic wilting symptoms. It helped that I planted at least two plants each of my favorite varieties so I didn’t have to throw out the only plant of my favorite in the world Black Krim Tomato.

If you had tweaks to your tomatoes this year, let us know.  We’re taking ideas to try next season. It’s a matter of pride and bragging rights.

Get Your Diseased and Gnarly Tomatoes OUT!

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

Saving Your Garden

It’s August and hot, not the most fun time in the garden, but you’ve got to get your diseased and gnarly tomatoes out and EVICT all the diseased and dying stuff out of your garden.  You’re not doing for this year’s produce…you’re doing to save your garden next year.

In Colorado with our warm winter and early hot Spring, we are inundated with pest problems.  Most on our minds today is the spotted wilt virus on tomatoes which makes pretty concentric circles on the tomatoes, but leaves the fruit tasteless and mealy…and kills the plant long before frost.  As depressing as it is to toss plants you’ve nurtured since they were just baby seeds, they’ve got to go. They aren’t going to get better and the virus will just get spread around your garden.

So get out there with your wheelbarrow and do some decluttering.

Tomato plants with spotted wilt virus or mosaic virus or even some nasty blight:  OUT! And not into your compost pile…they go right in the garbage.

Other plants with serious disease problems:  OUT!  You’re never going to eat those gone to flower broccoli covered with powdery mildew.

Weeds that have grown four feet tall when you weren’t looking are now going to seed.  Somehow huge prickly lettuce and thistles keep appearing out of nowhere with big seed heads.  OUT!

It won’t take long to clean up the big stuff….this is one of those 15-minute projects.  15 minutes now will make a huge difference later. 15 minutes now gives the good healthy tomatoes more light and space and water to make lots of fruit before frost.  15 minutes now means you pull all the diseased fruit and leaves out easily now instead of trying to retrieve dead rotting fruit and diseased leaves after frost has caused leaf drop.

And while you’re at it:  those big huge zucchini bats:  OUT.  Pull ’em off the plant so that nice tender young zucchinis can grow.  You’re just not likely to eat as much giant zucchini as you’re growing.  Let go of the guilt and send them to enrich the compost.

If Plants Could Walk

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

Escaping the Weather

by Sandy Swegel

They’d run for their lives!  This week anyway.  Extreme weather conditions prevail here in Colorado and throughout the country.  Here in Boulder, we’re enduring day after day of record-setting temps over 100.  Plants are crisping just from the 4% humidity.  And as we learned in our last severe drought in 2002, no matter how much city water you irrigate with, plants don’t do as well with irrigation as they do with natural water from rain.  If plants could walk this week, they would mosey on over to the shade next to the irrigation ditch for respite.

While we bake in the heat, my sister took her annual vacation to Florida so she could sit on the beach in the middle of Tropical Storm Debby.  Plants in some areas of the Gulf Coast desperately yearn for legs this week.  If only they could walk they would get out of the downpour of hard pelting rain and lift their feet out of the bog and mire that soil has become with excessive rain.  How’s a plant supposed to live when its roots are stuck in wet muck putrifying in the heat.

The happiest plants in dire weather can be the ones in containers with a doting human around.  My neighbor nudges her containers on wheels into the shade when the western sun is too debilitating.  Even her tomato loves the respite from the blazing sun.  Unlike my spinach, hers isn’t bolting because now that summer is upon us, she moved her containers of greens under the apple trees where cooling misters cool the greens enough they don’t have to bolt yet…and the apples grow big with the bit of extra water from the misters. One pot of summer greens was fortunate and moved inside into the air conditioning in a sunroom so the family could enjoy sweet lettuce greens a little longer.

Alas, for plants without feet, all you can do is offer some respite from the weather.  Shade cloth or row cover judiciously placed now might save some plants facing death from heat exhaustion.  If that’s not possible, a judicious mid-day misting sometimes helps.  The water mist may help the plant survive desiccation and it certainly helps perk up the gardener.

Plants that really need feet this week are the ones burning to death in the Colorado wildfires.  There are eight major wildfires in Colorado and over half of the wild-fire fighting crews in the US are in Colorado now.  We are so grateful to the men and women who come from near and far to battle out-of-control wildfires in 100-degree temps in heavy gear.  Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

How to Make Garden Friends

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Seeds Bring People Together

by Sandy Swegel

Many of the ideas for this blog come from questions I hear from an email list of gardeners I belong to.  I introduced a new gardener to our group this week and she was so grateful to suddenly have a whole network of people she could turn to when she had a question.  She’ll soon realize what we all know:  that it is so cool to have so many plant-geek friends.

Our group started rather accidentally, but you can start your own low maintenance group of garden friends.  You’ll learn lots about gardening and many of your gardening buddies will turn into real friends because gardeners are really nice people.

Most of our group had gone once or twice to a local gardening club but didn’t really fit in because we were interested in growing food and the garden clubs here were more interested in flowers.  Our group started accidentally by one of us posting a note on the virtual bulletin board of one of those proper flower groups that said, “Tomato Seed Swap, Saturday. Email for details.”  We just wanted to try some new varieties of tomatoes without going broke by each person ordering 10 different packs of seeds. We’d just order seeds together.  Well, ten people showed up for that first meeting.  Then, of course, we had to trade emails so we could find out how everyone else’s seeds were doing.  Then someone brought up the topic of manure and if that made tomatoes grow better.  Soon one person took a truck to a local farm and we all showed up at his house with an empty bucket for manure.  Come harvest season, another person invited us to her place to see her tomatoes.  The key to us becoming a cohesive group was that Niki saw how much fun we were having and declared “We needed a name.” and She announced we were the “Boulder Culinary Gardeners.”  Soon we were having email discussions about zucchini and herbs and organic pest control.  Although we had all been gardening on our own and felt we didn’t know much,  collectively, we knew a lot about gardening.  Post a question on the list and one of our small group had an idea of the answer.  Since then 10 people has become 150 and we all know so much more now.  We haven’t saved much money on seeds though.  Turns out gardeners can never have enough seeds.  So we still share tomato seeds, but we take the money we saved on those to buy heirloom squash and watermelons and plants we had never heard of before like broccoli raab.

You can make new garden friends pretty easily using this method.  Or help others build a community of friends who grow food.  A friend belongs to an HOA where people didn’t know each other well but all of them belonged to an email list for HOA business.  My friend offered HOA members a  free Seed Starting class and Seed Swap. (Seed avarice seems to be the real secret to bringing gardeners together.) Five people showed up and now are making friendships across the high fences of the HOA.

Make some new friends today.  Everybody wants to grow food these days but don’t know for sure how to do it.  Just about everybody wishes they had more friends with similar interests and don’t really know how to do that.  Seeds can bring people together.