More and more

July 3, 2016 Weekly Updates

With a good day of rain this week, the soil finally got a decent soaking after several weeks of intensely dry weather. Almost immediately, everything looked greener and bigger. The tomatoes are shooting up, requiring a new trellis line every week, and I got a small first harvest off of the bush beans this morning. To date, we’ve harvested over 42 lbs of food out of the garden since May 26! About a month into harvesting, we’ve now had a good amount of time to see how things are growing and how much we are able to use. As a result, this week was a great time to reevaluate our year’s plan for the garden....

Vertical gardening, simply

June 30, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

Using the vertical space in your garden is a great way to get the most yield out of a small area. There are tons of inventive, more complex vertical gardening systems, but you can still take advantage of vertical space while staying simple. It’s common to provide trellis support for crops like tomatoes and beans, but other crops like cucumbers, winter squash, and melons can be trellised vertically as well. All of these plants are expansive growers, creating a lot of green leaves and stems in proportion to the amount of fruit produced. Because of this, they can take up a significant amount of ground space, which can easily be freed back...

The crop pests cometh

June 24, 2016 Pests, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

There’s always that brief window in the year when I think, “Maybe this year is the year that I’ll have the perfect, pest-free garden.” And then they arrive! Despite a relatively light spring in terms of pest damage (we did have the broccoli annihilated by cut worms, but little else was affected), they’re here at last. The eggplant leaves are becoming speckled with the tiny, pin-prick holes that are the signature mark of flea beetles and, more severely, cucumber beetles have arrived to feast on the previously perfect squash and cucumber plants. If in your garden you’re noticing ragged holes on the leaves of these plants with the outside rim of...

All that empty dirt

June 18, 2016 Weekly Updates

The weather gets warmer, the plants grow bigger, but there’s still some bed space yet to be planted, something I’ve gotten asked about a lot recently. Even though it looks like an oversight, the empty beds are actually completely intentional and provide more than an occasional play space for my son! Coming from larger farms where there are always beds either waiting to be planted or having just been emptied of crops past their prime, this is something that seems natural to me. Still, it is much less common in smaller gardens where it can look like nothing more than a waste of space. In fact, it can be the opposite, providing an opportunity...

Aphid honeydew

June 13, 2016 Pests, Tips & Tools

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

June 9, 2016 Weekly Updates

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

June 1, 2016 Weekly Updates

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

May 26, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

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…

May 23, 2016 Weekly Updates

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

May 15, 2016 Weekly Updates

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...

Two Feet in the Dirt

urban farm

Vertical gardening, simply

Aphid honeydew

Harvesting lettuce greens