One more day of summer

It is supposed to get really cold on Saturday night. This is good for the garden, but bad for hot-loving farmers like myself. Luckily, I love my garden and am glad that the cold should do in the bugs that are munching on my brand new Red Russian Kale seedlings and my chard. All else seems to be going well. Seedlings of all types are pretty well established, and it's supposed to warm back up to lows on the 50s after our little cold snap. Perfect fall plant weather!

One more big plant project is coming up before winter's onslaught; high tunnels for some of the seedlings. I want to see if 1. I can have them without their collapsing at the first snow fall, and 2. They help the plants grow more vigorously in cold weather. I'll keep you posted!

Fall garden time

It has been ages, blog! Late summer tends to get me down a bit. The corn didn't quite work out, the tomatoes died of wilt, squash bugs abounded and still abound, and the second bee hive fled the premises. It is too depressing to write about in the moment and the bad stuff manages to obscure the good.

And there is a lot of good.We put up beets for the first time, not all the tomatoes died (we have put up a bunch of tomato sauce and the tomatoes keep coming!), the green beans did well, the crowders are insane, and the edamame rule.

All that being said, fall is here! And I feel like I've earned some cred as a southern gardener because I am nine kinds of excited! Beans and peas are growing well, as is a TON of dill (I helped a few flowers self seed), and cilantro is up! I finally cleaned out the front yard garden and planted mustard, rape, Wong bok, arugala, lentils (we will see how that goes...) and fava beans. YAY!!!!!

There is still so much more to be done...more weeding out back, and taking up the melon/cuke patch and some of the beans so that more fall plantings can go in.

I'll wrap it up with a shout out of thanks to a storm named Lee who got me the rain I have been dreaming of for months. Thanks Lee! Now let's go fall garden!

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!