The diseases of summer

It's been hot and it has been humid! It was dry for several weeks, and then the weather pattern changed and Durham has been muggy and assaulted by thunder storm after thunder storm. To be honest, I worry less about my plants when it rains than when it is dry, but I suspect that this summer may reverse my thinking on that subject. The tomatoes have started to produce beautifully, but I'm about to lose a substantial portion of the plants to wilt. Some plants were looking a bit wilt ridden when it was dry. Then the muggy came, and things went from and to dead pretty quickly. I blame myself as I made some bad cultivar selections this year; I started tomato seedlings for my mother in law this spring. She lives a couple of hours east of us and they have different wilt than we have here. I planted the seedlings she didn't have room for, and our type of wilt took em right out. I also planted black krims that I got at a seed exchange. I have no idea if they are resistant to anything. The rest of my plants are volunteers from last year. This will teach me to buy appropriate varieties and seed save rather than messing with other stuff. Tough lesson though.
Word is out from Debbie Roos at the Chatham County cooperative extension that downy mildew has struck some NC counties. In a high panic, I have started spraying my curcubits with Serenade. Durham was last hit with this shite disease in 2009 and I lost everything practically overnight. I am on it this time. I hope. I am pulling in beautiful cukes for the first time ever (thank you bees!) and I will be damned if I lose the whole crop.
In happier news, the bean and corn look mostly happy as do the amazing, mobile, reappearing peanuts. I am very excited for the blue coco beans. They are beautiful plants, and the baby beans are going to be a lovely, mottled blue and green! The crowder peas out front are growing like gangbusters, though the rest of the beans are smaller and more bug eaten than I would like. I suspect the lack of water for several weeks may be the culprit (no irrigation out front), but it's possible that the soil is lacking nutrients. I suspect that it is time for a soil test. I HATE soil testing. I have to dig so many holes!
Potato harvest is due to take place tomorrow. I think we lost some plants to the blight, so I will post about the size of the harvest once I have that information.

Bugs bugs bugs. And disease.

Well, summer is off to a swimming start. The blackberries are delicious. The tomatoes are coming in (!) and I saw a bee pollinating no fewer than 5 cucumber flowers. Gold star to that bee!!!! On the negative side, one of my squash plants was infested with squash bugs. I grabbed them all with my fingers and put them in a pail of soapy water. Yum. I went back the next day to get the remaining ones and just squished them with my fingers. Double yum. Some of the tomatoes have some kind of wilt. I'm being a bad gardner because I haven been able to bring myself to uproot them. So I will probably lose the entire harvest. So far, I do not have any vine borers. Everyone else I know who gardens downtown has them, so I think it's only a matter of time. I check every day, so hopefully I will catch them before my plants die. One of my poor pawpaw trees appears to have been scalded by the sun. I built it a shelter using my floating row cover, so hopefully it will not die.

In other news, the city is almost certainly going to sell us the triangle behind the house! Darko Urban Farm will be expanding!!!!!! I think we have large scale compost and lots of fruit trees and bushes back there. I don't think we are going to fence it in. If it all goes well, there will be a beautiful, available food forest back there in five years or so!

On the sad side, it is not raining almost at all. It's getting really bad. Apparently the corn crop out east has already been declared a lost cause. With our catchement system, we've managed without using much water from the city at all, but I'm not sure how much longer we can avoid watering.

All in all, things are good so far. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And freaking out that other people have squash out the ying yang while mine just flowered for the first time this morning. But it's all good.

And sometime soon, a little house that matches the people house will have feathered, egg laying residents... The house is cute cute cute! Yellow with white trim just like my house and with a blue front door just like my house! And I think we are going to stencil "Darko Urban Farm" on one side, not like my house, but awesome.

Permaculture!!!

Well, mark me down as a true believer. Meaning, I guess, that I no longer just think permaculture sounds good on paper. It IS good in the garden. I was visiting the garden briefly a couple of days ago after work. It looks jungle-y in a way that makes me forget how tidy and kind of barren it looked a few months ago. Now it is a mess of food and flowers and bugs. And I love it!!! I was taking a peek at the snap peas, which are kind of on their last legs; it is too hot for them and it is time for them to move over and make way for the beginnings of green bean season. All of the sudden, a VERY scary-looking bug was among the snap peas. It was beautiful, and it looked like the kind of bug that wouldn't think twice before taking you out. It was so clearly a death machine that I was afraid of, even though it was relatively small. I have never, ever EVER seen this type of bug before. It looked exotic. It looked like it would eat lots of pests!!! It looked like I had made this amazing, pest eating bug a home in my veggie /flower jungle!!!! I will take a look in my bug ID book, and if I identify this bug, I will share it here.

Now, if only it would rain. I've somehow managed to already run a 1700 gallon cistern dry....

Everything is better without a pressure regulator!

I am still coughing and sound like a seal, but I was out in the garden this afternoon with my sister and Mike (thank you guys so much!). I mostly stood around blankly while Alexis and Mike installed the drip irrigation system for the apple trees, a couple of blueberries, the hazelnut and the entire annual vegetable garden. I've been under the weather with what I call the epizootie, Will calls a summer flu followed by bronchitis, and my friend Sarah randomly characterized as a stomach bug. So Alexis and Mike saved the garden from a summer of hot dryness with my occasional input.

And they saved it with style! Water guns and weird shoes ensured that they had a blast and I had something to stare at when I felt like I was melting.

Once we got it all hooked up, the misters were kind of weak (my garden is really big, so it gets hard to keep the pressure up once you put in a few hundred feet of tubing). So....I took off the pressure regulator and everything got better! I am so excited to start using the misters combined with the awesome 1700 gallon cistern! Thanks again to the garden heroes of the long weekend, Alexis and Mike!

Spring. Like the Energizer bunny.

This spring just keeps going and going. It is cool and rainy for yet another week. While I adore hot, my greens and peas are loving the weather and are showing their love with a bumper crop of tasty food. I had no idea lettuce could get so big!

We had some hail last weekend, but it didn't do much damage. The flat, orange bugs have showed up and are infesting bolted greens and radishes. I don't know what they are and will try to remember to look it up in my bug book. We are reinvested with voles. This has made adopting Vole Cat Jr. Look pretty good.

All of the seeds were finally planted this past weekend. Now it is time to wait for them to sprout. And by wait, I mean weed, finish installing the irrigation system, build the cedar trellises for the cukes and melons, put a bird net over the peach tree, and weed some more. A farmer's work is never done! And thank goodness for that!

Lost post

I wrote a long post last week and it disappeared into the TTA's ether. It makes me nervous to blog on the bus, but I'm getting back on the proverbial bicycle and giving it another try.

This has been a big week for the garden. The asparagus is coming up like crazy; we are harvesting every other day now! Yum yum yum.

The greens are growing rapidly as it warms up, and the radishes are ready. We've been eating delicious salads at every meal.

The drip irrigation system is partially in place. I ran out of 1/4 inch drip tubing, so the project is on a temporary hold. It doesn't really matter yet, as it keeps raining. Speaking of rain, it has been nine kinds of crazy out here. There were over 100 tornados on Saturday in North Carolina. Durham barely got rain, but a few miles away, there was serious destruction and loss of life.

I'm glad for a lot of reasons that the weather stayed relatively sane by us, not least of which is that Will and I picked up the bees on Saturday. I already adore being a bee keeper. Bees are awesome!!! I really really hope they survive. I had words with the bees upon pickup about their duties regarding the cucumbers. Hopefully, this will prompt them to pollinate them! I already want a second hive.

One final note: I went on CFSA's farm tour for the third time this year. I wondered, "will it still be cool? I've already gone twice....". Oh MAN was it cool. I absolutely loved it!! I am so glad that CFSA and the farmers do this every year. It's this amazing chance to see where our food comes from, to get inspired about my own farm, to see baby animals, and to eat amazing food. Thank you CFSA and participating farmers! I'll be attending again next year!

Sleet, kiwis and asparagus

There is so much going on in the spring! Seedlings are getting bigger. I thinned arugala and endive yesterday and they made a tasty garnish for the yummy soba noodle salad I made with . . . FRESH ASPARAGUS!! Yum yum yum yum yum. This is year number three post crown planting, so we get to harvest until we're sick of it!

Will and I started construction of an arbor for the kiwi vines. It is awesome. I will post a picture when it is done. Then, we got the kiwis, the second pawpaw, the second raspberry and the goumi in the ground. And none too soon, as it proceeded to sleet on Sunday night and give us one more hard frost last night. I'm afraid to go look at the apple trees, a couple of which were in full flower. I guess it doesn't much matter; they're still babies, so I wasn't going to let them bear fruit this year anyway.

The indoor starts are doing okay. I've upped my game, by adding The Mister to my seed starting regimen. The Mister is something I saw at petsmart the other day. It is a watering device for reptiles, but it struck me that if it was gentle enough for a lizard, it would probably serve nicely for seedlings. And boy is it awesome. Pump up the air pressure, press a button and every seedling is well watered in under two minutes. It used to take me 15 minutes, and my hand would hurt from spritzing a million times.

On tap for tomorrow evening will be a second round of seed starting. I need to start a bunch of the seeds I got from Bountiful Gardens. I am especially excited for the approximately 90000000000 artichoke seeds I ended up with. I am hoping I know some peeps that will take some off my hands. I should probably start a seed starting business now that I have so many seeds and The Mister.

Location:S Mangum St,Durham,United States