Planted winter vegetable seeds

 The community garden offered up some new "Raised garden bed mix" from San Pasqual Valley Soils. We took advantage of that and put plenty in our box as over time the soil sinks. Whenever we add new soil or amendments, we then lift up the drip irrigation to put the tubes back in order. Once this was done, it was time to plant some seeds for winter crops. We planted carrots, beets, Swiss chard, Romanesco broccoli, and kohlrabi. 

Fish Emulsion to Citrus and Apple, Summer Garden

 A few more times this spring, twice in March and twice in June, I've applied fish emulsion to the citrus and apple trees. I wonder if it is helping my smallest mandarin a bit, but it is hard to tell if it is just normal spring growth. 

In the meantime, I'm harvesting delicious grape and cherry tomatoes that are mostly volunteers from the compost I spread near the trees or in pots. I planted some Celebrity tomatoes and Annie Oakley II okra starts in pots and at the community garden in June. 

The aphids and bagrada bugs have put a halt to the amazing swiss chard from this spring and really slowed down the kale. This seems to be a pretty normal cycle each year, so I'm just moving on.

At the garden, I planted seeds saved from kabocha squash and also planted whole mini pumpkins that are the descendants of the ones my daughters got at school 4.5 years ago. Like last year, I'm getting some bizarre squash from those that I didn't actually plant in addition to the mini pumpkins and kabocha I desired. At this point, there are some pumpkins although they look rounder. There's one that looks exactly like a golden acorn. And there's the omnipresent zucchini/random summer squash thing that's chubbier than a zucchini and more oval. Time will tell on the squash project, although it is fun to watch them and guess what's coming. For the record, some years I do grow squash from actual seed packets. I just didn't do it this year or last. 

Anyway, Happy Summer!

Planted some seeds

 I've been harvesting some gorgeous, huge swiss chard from the garden plus a few large beets. I meant to plant some beet seeds today but discovered I'm out. Instead, I planted some kabocha squash and bush bean seeds. The squash seeds are ones I saved from last year. The bush beans are from an old packet. I wonder if any will germinate. There are several plants already sprouted well from the miniature pumpkins I buried from last year. 

Planting seeds

 Today at the community garden plot, I tore out the rest of the old, aphid-infested kale that had been there a long time. The plants were big and woody, although they did provide new leaves that were fine. But they were so large that they were all over the place and felt like they took up half the space. In that area, I planted new seeds for kale, chard, carrots, beets and lima beans. The tomato plants from last week look fine and the newly replaced irrigation timer appears to be working. 

Fertilized Community Garden and My Favorite Gardeners

I used the organic vegetable fertilizer today at the community garden.  Last week I harvested the last of the turnips.  The lettuce is starting to bolt, so I'm trying to eat that up aggressively.  Unfortunately, slugs love my lettuce.  Today I picked a head of lettuce and removed 2 slugs from it.  I looked around for me and didn't see any.  While reaching for a bag, I turned the lettuce upside down and another slug fell out next to my foot!  Then, I looked more carefully to see if there were any more hiding.  I found one that had a good grip, so I turned the lettuce upside down again and shook it.  The slug clung on tenaciously, but 3 other little caterpillars sprinkled down!  Good grief!

I'm also harvesting some very nice carrots, some of which are surprisingly fat considering that I never thin the carrots.  Also, some beets and the chard is nearly as big as my 7 year old!  Here's a picture of the chard with DD and my niece's Flat Stanley.  I know the Flat Stanley looks like a snowman, but this one is from Connecticut, so it looks different than our San Diego Flat Stanleys.  Oh and check out our matching Yosemite shirts.  DD thinks it is so cool that our we're shirt twins!  We just had a wonderful family trip there with friends.

And here's a picture of the garden with my two favorite gardeners!  DS just turned 11 and DD is 7 1/2.

Massive Soil Testing: No nitrogen!

My northern, and to a lesser extent, my western garden beds have been suffering terribly.  I've put in dozens of tomatoes that died.  Plus many beet and green bean seeds have been total duds.  The shallots in the West bed are very sad as well.

Here are pictures from my north bed, where so many tomato seedlings have died.  The chard and parley are from last year.  There is one okay eggplant in that bed that is a start from a nursery this year.  Plus some of my cinnamon basil starts have survived.  Those things in yogurt containers are months old tomatoes that I started, like in February!  

I've been wondering if I've contaminated the bed with a persistent herbicide like Picloram because this fall I used horse manure that I composted in the bed before I knew about the issue.  I spoke about that some in this link.  But I was also hoping it was something like a pH issue.  In my compost pile use a ton of coffee grounds that I get in big bags from Starbucks, so I was wondering if perhaps the pH was just off.

On Friday I went to a good local nursery, Walter Anderson's, to gather advice.  I explored the send-away soil test options but the people there weren't selling it to hard, saying that the results were confusing, even for them to understand.  I'd heard that home test kits were iffy, but they seemed fairly confident in theirs.  So I came home with a new home test kit in addition to the pH probe I already had.

This weekend I did a lot of pH and NPK tests from these beds. I used both my pH probe and the pH that came in with the NPK test kits.  The probe gave readings about 0.5-0.75 lower than the test kit, but all were acceptable.  EVEREY SINGLE nitrogen test I did was ZERO!  The P and K were in the slightly low, to normal, to slightly high range.  So I'm averaging that out and calling the P and K good.  Here are my handwritten notes:

So how is it that my organic beds, amended with homemade compost and homemade worm castings has zero nitrogen??!!