I put up two tarps to block out some of the early-morning and late-evening sun, and just pulled those down today since it is looking like we’re going into an overcast stint.

When we bought the swiss chard, I was a bit concerned it wouldn’t stand up to the heat. The afternoon after planting (today), they looked a bit droopy but generally OK. We went to the Love Wins picnic, and when we came back, the swiss chard was flat to the ground and the tomatoes looked like they were dying. We dumped a bunch of soil conditioner and water on them, and they’re starting to come back. Mostly. (We may have some swiss chard plots that will become mustard plots in late August.)

Until the heat dies off and the plants recover, we’ve set up tarps over the fencing to act as shade for the swiss chard. Not great for the tomatoes, but hopefully it’s just temporary.

In addition, I’ve planted some beans—almost all empress beans, although a few Dragon’s Tongue beans. So here’s to a start of the belated 2010 growing season!

(PS: I’m considering doing a 12-month garden, with greens and cole in the winter. Because North Carolina is weird and hot year around like that.)

Of course, there’s also the fall-planted stuff (mostly greens), but I need to hold off on those until September.

Decisions this year: no corn, no root vegetables. Not going to fence around the other garden this year, but maybe we’ll put some watermelon and some herb bushes out there anyway. Also: we only need one zucchini plant, and probably going to use the small plot beside our garage for it.

Biggest winner: 16 tomato plans: 12 Black from Tula, 4 Potato Leaf. Also going to grow a bunch of green beans, but they get planted directly into the soil.

The chintzy plastic bases of the “home greenhouse” kit all broke/were lost, so instead we’re using a plastic storage tub to hold the peat pellets. We’ll see how that plays out.

Also, I put tarps over the remaining sections of the two larger gardens — although half of the larger gardens and the smallest garden have been covered (thereby killing off anything that might think about germinating), there were some big open spaces and they started to grow some stuff, so that all has to die. Hopefully the next few weeks are long enough to kill off most of those weeds. If not, hopefully the wood chips and newsprint gets whatever is left!

If you’re in the Durham/Hillsborough/Chapel Hill area and are interested in learning about organic gardening, check out the Frog Pond Farm workshops.

one 13 oz zucchini
5oz hot peppers
5 radishes
2lbs green beans
one 10.5 oz tomato

Lessons Learned

• The zucchini plant needs 3 feet in all directions. Minimum. It will try to take as much space as it can.
• For buckwheat (or, presumably, any cover crop) to take, the garden needs to be broken and more-or-less level. Tossing it out onto clumpy soil doesn’t get any results. (I think Jesus said something about this once upon a time…)
• The support provided by tomato cages is less about the stalk and more about these gigantic orbs of fleshy, juicy goodness hanging off of these spindly branches. A single bamboo stick is fine to start, but more is needed pretty soon thereafter.
• Beans. Holy crap. Bush beans are no big deal to grow, but they do an annoyingly good job hiding their produce when it comes time to harvest. Pole beans (especially these Sultan Beans) grow like CRAZY, and they are basically veins that are reaching towards your house and would probably swallow it hole if given half a chance. While the bamboo sticks seemed like a just fine solution to start with, they outgrow them very quickly: some kind of line to grow along is necessary.
• Radishes and carrots aren’t worth the trouble. They’re temperamental, they grow weird, and you don’t get a lot of produce out of each plant. Probably going to be my opinion of root plants in general.
• It takes three solid weeks of covering an area with a tarp for all the weeds to die off. And even then, you’ve only got about a week before the weeds re-invade (or grow back up, or whatever). So whatever you’re doing with that dirt, do it fast.

BTW

Alicia took some photos, but she hasn’t uploaded them yet. I took some pictures of price tags at the grocery store, which we’ll use for calculating our strict ROI.

Found another rose token while putting buckwheat into the dead garden: maybe I’ve been watching too much Lisa Williams, but it seemed like a sign of Mr. Mallard’s approval. (More on rose tokens here.)

I’m looking at doing a podcast for Durham Locavores (obviously of interest to Durham foodies in general). Stay tuned for more.

(We’re tracking production closely so we can see what our costs vs. savings are.)

</snark>

I went with the 30 gal bin instead of the 45 gal, since the 45 gal bin was about twice as expensive and square instead of round. I did splurge on the one with wheels, though. Once we fill up the 30 gal bin, I’ll pick up a second 30 gal bin and let the first one finish doing its thing.

Total cost: $15 and about an hour of meditative bore-turning.

BTW, if you’re an urbanite without space for a 30 gal garbage bin or two or if you live in an area where it’s too cold for composting outdoors, seriously look into Worm Composting with Red Wigglers. It’s an extremely simple way to save some landfill space and create free soil conditioner for container gardening, etc. And if you’re in Durham, let me know if you do that—I’ll take your compost!

Beans, Dragon Tongue: 11.2 oz (pods are HUGE)
Beans, Empress: 7 oz
Beans, Total: 1 lbs, 2.2 oz

Also picked 4 more radishes. Some of them were comically large—guess we should have picked them earlier!

The carrots just don’t seem to be working. We pulled two to thin them out, but they don’t look like carrots: just slightly thick roots. Another victim of planting too close together, maybe?

The potted peppers really aren’t looking good: they look extremely dry. The containers might be allowing too much heat to get into the dirt and not holding enough moisture in. We’re going to have to get more aggressive about watering (2x/day), I guess.

Photos from today: