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New planting year

Bible Street Community Garden’s Health Team recommends a few simple steps before you plant.

1. Remove any weeds. For obvious reasons. Weeds compete with your plants and usually don’t taste as good.

2. Do NOT turn your soil. Turning the soil breaks the soil’s structure and disrupts the microbial processes that are happening down there in the dark that work to feed your plants. If the soil in your bed is compacted, aerate it by using a garden fork to gently lift the soil. Simply push the fork 6-8″ into the soil and lift slightly. This will open up the structure of the soil and allow air, water and nutrients to reach down into your bed. Be sure not to step on your bed!

The Garden has received a load of topsoil mixed with 50% compost and this is a perfect addition to add to the top of your bed. An inch of topsoil is plenty to spread evenly over the top.

3. Add a cover of shredded leaves or seedling hay to mulch your bed and keep it from drying out. When you are ready to plant simply use your trowel to gently move the soil aside and plunk your plant into the space you’ve created. Pat the soil back around the plant to make sure you get good contact between the roots and the soil.

4. Go talk to the other gardeners and find out what they’re planting in their beds and get ideas. Have you started your tomato seedlings yet?

drought

Thankfully, the temperatures have dropped away from the 90s that we had for what felt like a month. But we have had very little rain and that can be a big stressor to plants trying to make fruit.

The good news is that most of us have added compost to our garden beds and that helps the soil retain moisture for plants to grow deep roots. The deeper the roots the healthier the plant.

A good mulch is like wearing a hat against the sun. It helps keep you cool and does the same for the garden bed. It also keeps the moisture in the soil from evaporating away. Use leaves, pine needles, straw or seed straw to dress the soil around your plants. [Look for straw bales to the right of the shed!]

Weed regularly. Weeds steal water and nutrients from your garden plants. Watering deeply every other day is better than watering a little everyday. Deep watering encourages deep roots and keeps the soil cool.

Water early in the day or late in the evening when the sun won’t burn the water off. I had a gardener once who said that when you water in the heat of the day you are basically boiling your plants. Not sure that is exactly true, but I take the point!

Harvest! Less plant or fruit to service means your plants can save energy. Tomatoes can finish ripening on the kitchen counter, safe from marauding chipmunks and give your plants a break. They’ll switch back to their productive selves once the weather cools.

Now is a good time to tidy up around your bed, respecting your neighbors and practicing good hygiene. Take some time to weed, water, mulch and clean and serve the community in community gardening!

I’m making a list of plants for next year that are known for tolerating a little drought: black-eyed peas, okra, horseradish, and Jerusalem artichokes. What’s on your list?

powdery mildew

Now is the season for squash, cucumbers and … powdery mildew! Powdery mildew can damage, even kill, your plants as sure as any insect infestation. Worse, it spreads in the air and water and lives in the soil. It is a fungus and looks like a flour dusting on the leaves of the plant.

Powdery mildew

While this fungus is relatively easy to prevent, if left untreated, it can cause the leaves to curl and turn brown and potentially kill buds that produce squash. And it is highly susceptible to spreading to other garden plots.

Conditions this year have been great for the fungus: high humidity and warm temperatures. However, sunlight is a good disinfectant as long as it can reach the leaves. If plants are too crowded or have many overlapping leaves the microclimate around the plant can be a breeding ground for the fungus. 

Thinning the leaves to allow sunlight to reach the full plant can help, as well as increasing air circulation. Use shears to cut away contaminated leaves — be sure to discard in the trash, NOT the compost, because then it can infect the soil for next year!

One added benefit of thinning the leaves a bit is to expose the blooms of the plant to pollinators.

Baking soda is an excellent treatment for powdery mildew. Mix into a 32 oz spray bottle of water: 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp vegetable oil, 1/4 tsp dish soap. Shake the liquid to dissolve the baking soda and spray on and under your plant leaves and stems. Repeat after rain. 

Alternatively, the neem oil in the planting shed is another excellent control for powdery mildew.

tomato growing tips

Stake your tomatoes and have them grow vertically. Tomatoes on a staked plant are larger and ripen earlier than those on a sprawling plant. Good air circulation around leaves and fruits of upright plants curbs disease. And fruits held high are free from dirt and slugs and out of reach of those pesky, but adorable chipmunks. Here is a good example from the garden:

Tie the vines to the stake with a piece of cloth to avoid cutting into the stem.

Confine each plant to a single stem by removing all suckers, ideally before any are an inch long. A sucker is a shoot that grows from a bud originating at the juncture of a leaf and the main stem. Go over your plants at least weekly, using your fingers to snap off each side shoot. 

Tomato plant sucker

Inspect your plants for pests and remove them, spray with cayenne flavored soapy water when the sun is high to reduce the risk of powdery mildew forming.

Water. Keep your plants moist down to 6 -8 inches in the soil and with this heat you will harvest a bumper crop! Watering slowly at the base of the plant is preferable to watering the whole plant to prevent mildew.

Air-flow management. Remove diseased leaves and discard in trash. Not only will your plants be healthier, but they will get the needed air flow to stay that way.

Mulch will help hold in moisture, reduce weeds and help prevent bacterial and fungal disease.

tomato hornworm

A fellow gardener sent in a photo this morning of a Horned Tomato Worm.

Tomato hornworm

It is the larval stage of the five-spotted hawk moth, Manduca quinquemaculata, or Sphinx Moth. The Latin genus name “Manduca” means glutton and horned tomato worms are just that. Tomatoes are their host plants and they will quickly strip the leaves of tomatoes, peppers and anything of the Solanaceae family — peppers, eggplants, potatoes and tomatoes!

They can grow up to 5 inches long! While the worms look a bit fierce, the horn on the back is not sharp enough to pierce the skin nor are they poisonous to touch. Pluck them off and feed them to your chickens. Or knock them into a bucket of soapy water.

While you may not find the worm you may very well see the frass (fancy word for worm poop) on leaves. It can be prodigious!

Hornworm frass

Soapy water mixed with a bit of cayenne pepper in a spray bottle is the key to keeping your plants safe from these voracious feeders. NOW is a good time to spray and again after it rains.

cucumbers

Cucumbers are an easy crop and it’s not too late to sow seed for a late summer/fall harvest.

Cucumber plant sprouts

For those of you with mature plants, have them staked to keep the fruit off the soil and less susceptible to slugs.

Keep a lookout for cucumber beetles and their eggs.

Cucumber beetle
Cucumber beetle eggs

These bugs will wreak havoc on your cucumber and squash plants. Check the underside of leaves and around your plants and remove the bugs and eggs and destroy them. If you have damage but no sign of the bugs, spray with Neem oil. There is a labeled jug in the shed with a sprayer.

weed, water, and reap!

Weeds take up valuable minerals that your vegetables can use and they can harbor pests and disease that affect your plants. Pull them out and keep your soil covered either by planting thickly or with a fine mulch. It’s like a hat for your soil, keeping the microbes happy and active, holding in moisture and holding the temperature stable — one less thing your plants have to stress over.

Water every day if possible in this heat. Rain has skipped our area over the last couple weeks and plants need water! If you can’t visit every day, spend a good 10-15 minutes soaking the ground to keep your plants happy.

Reap what you’ve sown! The payoff starts now! If you’re growing basil, pinch the leaves back to encourage the plants to bush out and to keep them from flowering — the minute they flower, they will no longer put out leaves.

sharing your peas

I’ve heard from a few of you that your peas are being eaten by someone that’s not you!

Nibbled peas

This uninvited guest is most likely chipmunks that get through the fencing.

Chipmunk

My recommendation is to plant a lot so that everybody gets some. A good, tall trellis might help by letting the critters have the lower portion and you get the easy-to-pick top portion.

You can also plant some aromatic herbs around your pea plants — herbs like sage and rosemary apparently put chipmunks off.

Remember, you can plant peas again in the fall — they are a cool season crop — plant in early August for October harvest.

We can try to outsmart the chipmunks, but in the end, I say: share — which is what we’re doing on this earth anyway.

good bugs

Not all bugs are bad! Not even the ones that look scary.

Ladybug nymph

This is a ladybug nymph, or juvenile. This 1/2-inch baby ladybug is nothing like the beetle we know and love, but it will eat hundreds of aphids before it pupates into an adult. Ladybugs’ favorite food is aphids, but they also eat other garden pests like whitefly pupa, thrips and spider mites.

Ladybug with aphids

Ladybugs also eat pollen. You can encourage them to browse in your garden by planting dill, chives, marigold, cosmos and sweet alyssum.

Ladybug on a flower

p.s. It’s getting hot! Don’t forget to water deeply to keep your plants from getting stressed, which makes them more susceptible to pests.

flea beetles

Flea beetles have little back legs that help them jump around like a flea, but they are, in fact, beetles. 

Flea beetles like to eat young leaves and seedlings early in the season, especially of the Brassica family —  broccoli, cabbage, kale, radishes, as well as the nightshade family of plants such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.

Adult beetles feed on foliage, producing “shotholes” in the leaves. Look out for these small round holes especially on young seedlings, where damage can stress plants and stunt growth. 

Flea beetles are repelled by catnip, sage, mint, hyssop, nasturtium and basil — all terrific additions to a plot. Nasturtiums are fast growing in the heat and produce edible flowers!

Flea beetle