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. 

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.

Fertilized garden, harvesting

I fertilized at the community garden with Dr. Earth's dry fertilizer.  Watered it in. I have a fair bit of aphids getting going on the kale and bok choy.  I have a new sprayer attachment for the hole, which I used to blast them off.  But this attachment isn't a keeper 'cause everything nearby got wet, too.  I'll have to look for a different one.

I've been harvesting kale, bok choy (which is now bolting), beets, onions, and lettuce.  

Worm Bin, Planted seeds

Today we cleaned out half the worm composting bin to harvest the worm castings and make room for more composting.  I used the worm castings in the N. bed, W. bed, and on both mandarins.

The prior oil spray seems to have improved the black aphid situation on the chard but it is far from over.

The prior compost addition to the N. and W. beds did indeed attract the raccoon back for more digging.  Fortunately, it didn't dig out any plants this time, just the dirt/compost.  I'm sure the worm castings will be a raccoon magnet.

I also planted seeds from romaine and buttercrunch lettuce and for beets in the N bed.  I hope those don't get trashed tonight by the raccoon.

Happy New Year!

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??!!

How much are 16 caterpillars worth?

Today's garden yield included 2 cherry tomatoes, over 6 pounds of Manderin oranges and 16 juicy caterpillars.  Since early November when I did a big seed catalog order, I've been keeping track of my garden expenses and yields.  My little spreadsheet includes expenses of seeds, plants, pots and stakes totally $73.49.  I didn't include wages for our work or expenses of watering because they were too hard to quantify and, hey, its a labor of love.  My yields record all the garden produce I've harvested since November 1: chard, lettuce, eggplants, tomatoes, herbs, lemons, oranges, lima beans, black-eyed peas, pomegranates, radishes, potatoes, and butternut squash.  Assigning values to each produce item, trying to be comparable to organic produce at the store, my yield so far is about $156.  But today's yield included 16 little green caterpillars eating my turnip greens.  How much are they worth?  How will I fit them into the equation?

I plucked them off.  They are now residing in a jar with greens from turnips and from a nearby radish, which wasn't infested with the caterpillars.  I'm setting it up as a preschool science experiment.  Do you think the caterpillars will selectively eat the turnip greens in the jar?  Or had they just not noticed my lovely radishes?  Oh!  Gotta add the radish and baby turnip to the yield totals!

Ok, my science mind is starved by motherhood.  I got out some old equations to work on the caterpillar density.  I know that 16 caterpillars might not sound that remarkable to you, but they were found in my little container garden.  One pot of lonely turnips, the pot being about 12 inches in diameter.  Feel free to check my math...  That is a radius of 6 inches.  The surface area of the pot is pi*r*r = 113.1 square inches.  That's 0.15 caterpillars per square inch, or 20.4 caterpillars per square foot.  Gosh, if I had an acre of turnips, they'd have 887,397 caterpillars on them!  That feels like a caterpillar plague of Biblical proportions in my little pot!