Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

All those plant starts and seeds you placed in your garden a month late (due to a never-ending spring supply of cold temperatures and LOTS of rain) are now racing to the finish line of harvest-ready fruit and vegetables.  

That’s assuming we panting, sweaty gardeners are not tripped up by a smirking, evil early frost!

I keep hearing the rumor of us deserving an “Indian Summer” (defined as a killing frost followed by a long period of warm weather) for this growing season, but I’m not betting the ripe tomatoes and peppers on such a hope.

Non-chemical methods of “encouraging” your garden plants:  water as needed (don’t wait for limp, curling leaves), use shade cloth to lower temperatures at the leaf level (simple dark sheer curtains will work) when the Summer sun is “sizzling” hot, add nutrients (food) such as wood stove ash (potassium), coffee grounds (calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus), and compost tea or manure tea (brew it up in a solar-warmed steel drum).  Or you can “encourage” your garden plants with chemical means (a “balanced” commercial 16-16-16 fertilizer), but be aware that the commercial fertilizer can act like gasoline poured on an open fire – you never quite know what will happen.

Here at Rancho McGinty, the garlic is ready to harvest, and looks and smells great – big bulbs this year.  The potato plants have excellent blue, white and yellow flowers, so hopefully something good is happening underground.  Our sweet potatoes had a rocky, late start, and are just now spreading out over the black woven plastic weed block in which they grow – we’ll see what happens.  And the “Doyle” blackberry vines are covered with lots of small green berries, and even more white flowers – blackberry milkshakes may be on our menu.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On Tuesday, 09 August, our local garden club will depart Camden Grange and Community Center (7 Camden Road, Elk) at 7 P.M. to visit another local garden.  This tour will focus on what we can do to continue our garden glee when weather conditions and/or our maturing bodies do not cooperate with our fruit and veggie production goals:  heat, drought, bad back, creaky knees are all considerations.

Our host was a successful farmers’ market entrepreneur for decades, and loved scrabbling in the dirt – time has taught him some valuable lessons, and he wants to share ideas on how to garden when “stuff” happens.  We will see and talk about wicking baskets/buckets, container plants, homebuilt greenhouses, plants grown in “grow bags” and steel drums, the timely application of liquid fertilizers, and much more.

Gardening in the open air is a good thing for the soul, but you may want to garden early and late in the day, and take up residence next to the air conditioner/fan during the Heat.  Stay cool!

 

 

 

Garden tour video posted

If you missed July’s tour of the North Country Food Pantry garden, take heart. You can now view it on YouTube. Club videographer Geoff Carlson has put together a show of tour highlights. It’s interesting to see how the garden has changed over the last few years — this was the club’s third visit. And it’s all done with volunteer labor and mostly donated seeds and plants (our Barbara Midtbo supplied those lush tomatoes). Have a look! https://youtu.be/9JPhV1QuAUo

July garden club tour warning

after repeated demands/requests from club members, we are indeed returning to the North County Food Pantry community garden (located at 40015 North Collins Road, Elk) for an update from garden manager Chris Stevens.  Chris says that since we last visited a couple of years ago, he and his crew have installed a new raised beds drip irrigation system (pro tip for those of us with multiple raised beds!), a much larger (and more efficient) composting set up, and he says he is trying a new white paper weed mulch as well.  lots to see - remember, this garden crew produced more than 7000 pounds of produce for the food bank last year - they must be doing something right!

if you must drive directly to the food bank, rather than meet at Camden Grange and Community Center (located at 7 Camden Road, Elk), please let Chris alone, so he can prepare for the incoming crowd.

also, Chris says he is looking for garden helpers, as his current staff is overwhelmed with the ongoing garden expansion, so if you have an open hour or two during the week, please talk to Chris.

also also, Chris is looking for LOTS of starter pots and their carrying trays, as well as any manually-powered garden hand tools.  if you have some of those things to donate, please bring them along - this is certainly a worthy cause.

see you at Camden Grange and Community Center, for a prompt 7 P.M. departure, for the short drive to the food bank garden.

jim.

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

Well, we went from +60 degree Fahrenheit days to +90 degree days in just under two weeks, so apparently this “new normal” weather we are experiencing will make gardening more “challenging,” and maybe even “really difficult. ”We gardeners will have to be both flexible and watchful if we want to harvest actual food:  +60 degree days were great for the cool weather crops (broccoli, cabbage, lettuce), but now at +90 degrees, the plants look a little wilty (if that’s a word), while the warm weather crops (sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers) are looking pretty smug!  I may have to place some shade cloth over the early spring plants, if I don’t want them to “bolt” and go to seed, or turn bitter to our taste buds.  It’s still early days for our summer gardening season, so we’ll see how it plays out.

Here at Rancho McGinty, the garlic stalks are waist high, the various “Irish” potato plants are greening-up, the aforementioned cabbage and broccoli look really good, and the squash plants look persistently poisonous.  

Speaking of “Irish” potatoes, I’m trying a new-to-me method to control our potato scab problem:  according to my over-winter research, spuds grown in a sand and wood chips/shavings/sawdust soil mixture are less likely to have the bacteria, and resultant disfiguring lesions.  I will have to fertilize the potato crop using manure tea applied through my fertilizer-irrigator (“fertigator” – cute name, huh?) and drip irrigation lines, and I’ll keep you posted on the results.

I have covered most of the crops with white floating row cover (“Ree-May” or “Agribon” brand names are available from Northwest Seed and Pet in Spokane) to keep out the evil beetles, aphids, and egg-laying moths, provided of course, that the crop does not need to be pollinated:  cabbage without cabbage looper worms, broccoli without aphids, potatoes without Colorado potato beetles!  Even if the crop does need pollination (squash, cucumbers, tomatoes), I just open both ends of the row cover tunnel for an hour or two in the morning, and the bees find a way – makes me kind of a bee pollen pimp, LOL?

Regular, adequate watering of the garden plants is important now, so poke your finger tip (your “Manual Digital Water Detection Device, Mark 1”) into the dirt to see if the plants need more water – it’s possible to both underwater or overwater your green babies, so a dirty, damp finger (up to the first knuckle) is good news.

In the orchard, now is a great time to thin the juvenile baby apples, pears, plums, etc.  Keeping the fruit six inches apart or so, will help reduce bruising, and if this Summer is as dry as last Summer, manual thinning will help prevent the trees from the dreaded “self-thinning”, in which they drop most of the unripe crop onto the ground – GASP, OH MY!

GARDEN CALENDAR: 

On July 12^th, our local gardening club will be again touring a neighboring garden, the location of which is still secret!  We will depart Camden Grange and Community Center (7 Camden Road, Elk) at 7 P.M. for a fun and informative evening.  You will want to bring along something to take notes or photos – lots to learn there!

That’s it for now – remember to drink lots of water, ingest salt tablets as necessary, and hide from the heat and direct sun, as much as you can.  We don’t want to read about you.