Are you noticing a lot of ants in your garden? This could be a sign that you have aphids, tiny insects that love eating a wide variety of plants. When aphids eat, the sugary plant sap is ejected from their bodies, created what is called aphid “honeydew.” Ants of course love to eat this sweet excretion and are therefore attracted to areas with high densities of aphids. But don’t worry too much. With the exception of grey aphids, which are a serious problem for brassica crops and appear more in the later summer and fall, I have rarely if ever had aphids be enough of a problem that the plants haven’t been able...
June Photo Shoot
To provide a fuller visual picture of the garden throughout the year, I’ve decided to make one photo-based post each month. Here’s the first one, for the month of June, posted a little late after yesterday’s high-wind thunderstorms knocked our power out until just a few hours ago! The garden’s pathways may look a little ragged right now, but that stuff sprouting along the paths that appears to be weeds is actually clover in its early stages. Eventually, this clover will provide a solid ground cover and weed deterrent throughout the pathways. ...
Summer at last
Wow, this week has gotten away from me. It’s Wednesday already, but with the weather finally warm and sunny, it’s hard not to spend all of my free time out in the garden. One week after being planted, the tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings have all begun to put on brilliantly green new growth, a sure sign that they’re getting accustomed to life in the ground. As a result, I stocked up on trellis stakes earlier this week and will begin the ongoing process of “basket-weave” trellising the tomatoes in the next day or two. The garden is getting fuller and fuller, with about two-thirds of the space now planted....
Harvesting lettuce greens
After a fun night awake with a baby with stomach flu, I got out as early as I could this morning to harvest the first of the spring mix! It’s important to harvest lettuce as early in the day as possible to keep the bitterness down. Surprisingly, lettuce contains latex, in the form of that milky liquid that leaks out of the stem when cut. At night, lettuce plants pull much of the latex down into their roots. As the sun rises and the heat of the day increases, the bitter latex is gradually sent back up into the leaf, explaining why lettuce harvested earlier in the day tends to be sweeter....
Here comes the sun- kind of…
I decided I wasn’t going to post this week until the sun came out again! Well, today it has, although in all honesty, it’s actually that weak, cloud-filtered sunlight that wouldn’t really count unless you haven’t seen much else for the rest of the month. Heck- at this point I even get excited about a little bit of blue peeping through the clouds! Last Friday, on a truly gorgeous, sunny day, I was finally able to get all of the summer crops into the ground. Usually, I plant the tomatoes, eggplant, squash, etc. around May 7, close to our average last frost date of the year. Although it hasn’t come close to frosting...
Working together
Well, the raininess continues, but yesterday we did get a beautiful, sunny morning for the City Harvest plant pick-up. City Harvest is a program within the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Working with a large partnership of urban gardeners and farmers, City Harvest provides seedlings and other supplies to these sites and, in exchange, the farms and gardens donate a share of what they grow to food cupboards and community kitchens throughout Philadelphia. For me, one of the most powerful benefits of growing in an urban setting is the ability to quickly and easily get nutritious food to many people. I had been part of City Harvest with the most recent farm I managed, donating...
May showers
There hasn’t been much opportunity for gardening this past week. By Mike’s calculation, we hadn’t seen sun from one Saturday to the next. Instead, it’s been a steady succession of rain, clouds, and more rain. After weeks of weather that had been mostly warmer and dryer than average, this real spring weather came as a bit of a shock to the system. But at least it saved me from time spent watering all the seeds planted last week! And, with the rain’s help, we have the first germination in the garden, with both the spring mix and arugula shooting their cotyledons (or first leaves) above the ground. In the midst of...
It’s go time!
The deer fence is finally up, our biggest project and necessity before the garden can really get going. It turned out to be both easier and more complicated than I expected. Because our garden is built on a moderate incline, we had to bunch the fencing at some of the posts to prevent the change in elevation from causing unwanted slackness. However, the whole process was faster than anticipated, with the entire fence up and ready to go in about two-and-a-half hours. And we were immediately reminded of what all the work was for as several deer watched us finishing up at dusk. Worrying that the deer would run right through the fencing in the dark, we...
The giant killing machine
What does your family like to do for fun? In our time off, we like to dig giant trenches throughout our front yard! I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re crazy. A little over a year ago, we bought this house with a beautifully seeded lawn sloping down to the front door. And now we’re systematically tearing it apart, first breaking the sod up by hand and then with a tiller and now digging trenches as deep as we can get. Well, it’s all in the name of rodent control, more specifically groundhogs. I’ve worked on farms with groundhog pressure in the past and, as you well know if you’ve experienced the...