Food Gardening

More adventures in interplanting

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I’ve been leading the vegetable team at the Derwood Demo Garden since 2008, and the garden’s been through a lot of changes in that time. At first, we were able to expand our territory considerably, with increasing numbers of volunteers to clear weedy areas at the periphery. But recently, since we’ve added a small fruit team, the 100-square-foot garden, and this year’s expanded straw bale garden:

(we call it Taj-Ma-Straw)

there is less territory for straight-up vegetable gardening. Which is all to the good, because it forces me to think about more efficient and flexible use of space. We learn from the intensive planting teams, and replicate on a larger scale.

One example has been the cabbage bed. I got a little enthusiastic about cabbages this year (mostly because I could start them nice and early inside) and filled up an area about 6 by 10 feet with them in March. Then, in May, we started planting summer crops, and I realized that I had basically no room left anywhere for peppers. The answer – plant them between the cabbages!

We actually had to take out every other cabbage (not heading up yet, but still edible) to plant the peppers, and in a week the remaining cabbages had grown enough that we had to take out a few more and trim outer leaves on many of the rest, to allow enough sun and water to reach the peppers (and a few eggplants). Next week we should see the cabbages either heading up or otherwise ready to come out, so we can remove the row cover from the peppers (we’ll probably leave a smaller one over the eggplants, against flea beetles).

I’ve also planted bitter gourd and Armenian cucumber in the middle of one tangle of pea vines, and am planning to set zucchini among another. In general we’re using every bit of space we have – including this lovely cover crop of phacelia that’s been waiting on a delivery of sweet potato slips:

Sweet potatoes should go in next week, and we will only need to cut the phacelia plants back right before planting, since the slips will go into a high pile of compost set into an oval of hardware cloth, not directly into the ground. Meanwhile, the bees are buzzing around those flowers.

In my own community garden plot, I’ve been starting summer crops like cucumbers and squash right into the middle of lettuce and radishes, and earlier in the spring I sowed beets and chard in between imagined tomato plants, which have now taken the places I left for them.

In the next bed over, I’m starting sweet potatoes in between cabbages and other greens. And if I can manage it, I’ll put fall greens in the tomato bed – the trick is keeping them covered against the inevitable harlequin bugs until I can take out the tomatoes and put up a big tunnel to keep the greens protected when it gets cold. I’ll also be adding lots of compost as I go along, to keep all those crops fed.

Interplanting is a good exercise in planning and imagination, and it’s satisfying to see the garden used to its full capacity.

Uneven Spring Growth? Could be the MGM

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Manufactured Growing Medium (MGM) is the stuff urban gardeners and farmers often use when soils are degraded, compacted, infertile, or missing in action. Leafy greens can be produced in 100% compost or leaf mould (as long as they are watered and fertilized as needed) but most other crops grow best in a blend (MGM) of two or more ingredients such as compost, soilless “potting mix,” and topsoil. MGMs vary based on the type and amount of individual ingredients.

I visited a small urban grower this week who was seeing some growth variation in leaf crops grown in a compost-topsoil blend. The transplants were uniform in size and appearance, and grown in a commercial greenhouse. Weeks later the grower noticed that all plants had good color but some were smaller in size and these seemed to occur randomly. Soil pH was 7.0- no problem there. Drainage was ok and there were no signs of root or stem diseases, or insect feeding.

The MGM contains small pieces of bark and wood, along with pebbles, clumps of clay, and partially decomposed organic matter. The physical, chemical, and biological properties of the MGM may vary enough to cause growth differences depending on the location of the plant and its root system in the beds. This problem will probably smooth out over the next year with cultivation, freeze/thaw cycles, addition of fertilizers, and further breakdown of the organic components.

 
Same site. These three 1/2 barrels were filled with MGM from the same large pile. Kale plants in the container on the right are much smaller than kale plants on the left.  A non-uniform MGM could cause uneven growth!
MGMs are going to become more important as urban food production expands. Before making a purchase ask for test results and  examine the product closely.

Keeping the plants covered

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If there’s one thing you learn after living in Maryland for a while, it’s that spring is variable. (Not just in Maryland, of course, but that’s where I am.) Just when we’ve had some brilliant sunny days in the 70s and even 80s, the cold hits again and makes you think you’re back in winter. This week we’ve had nights dipping into the 30s, and some plants that were happy a week ago are not so sure they want to be outside.

And then of course there are the plants you want to put into the ground (or outside in pots to harden off) nice and early for a head start, before you can be sure temperatures are going to stay above freezing, and the ones that need protection against the insects that are already flying around – and you really have to think covers and protective devices. There are lots of these on the market, and we’ve posted about quite a few. Here are some I’ve used just this spring.

The good old basic floating row cover is what I reach for first. This one is a summer-weight insect barrier, protecting cabbages from the butterflies that want to lay eggs on them, but even this lightweight cover helps to keep plants a little bit warmer, and stops some of the drying effect of those fierce winds we’ve been having. (Just make sure it’s held down well.)

We also use other materials to keep insects off, including this wedding netting that works perfectly over a wire frame in containers.

I was curious this winter about a product called HotKaps, so I ordered some and used them over my seedling cabbages when I first planted them in my community garden (this photo is from March). The plants now have row cover over them, but I had neglected to order more of that, oops, so had to go with these mini-covers made of wax paper. My conclusion is that I don’t like them, but they may do well for you if you have nice even friable soil that you can pile around the edges of each cap to hold it down, though I’d advise using soil staples as well. I was putting them down on a windy, rainy day, and had lumpy soil and compost plus leaves to work with, and only enough staples to use one per cap. They were finicky and annoying, and they keep the rain out so need to be lifted so the plants can be watered. Supposedly they are reusable, but I threw these out after removing them.

I may have mentioned in a previous post that I ended up with huge Sweet Mojo tomato seedlings because I mistook the seeds for those of peppers and put them in too early. (My other tomato seedlings are still inside, and a well-behaved four to six inches high now.) Well, I got tired of trying to accommodate these three huge plants, and took them out to harden off and then be planted out, two in the demo garden and one in my home garden, just before our drop in nighttime temperatures. We are experimenting with two protection methods for these way-before-Mother’s-Day tomatoes. This red one is a Kozy Coat – similar to the Wall-o-Water device. You fill the plastic channels around the outside with water, which both holds the tube down and creates a little greenhouse to keep the plant warm. I checked this one today and it is doing fine, as is the one in my slightly-less-windy home garden.

For the other plant, we made a mini-tunnel out of a perforated plastic material that lets air in but keeps the plant warm. It won’t protect against a hard frost, but it also shouldn’t fry the plant unless temperatures go way up. Here’s a close-up:

We should be able to remove these devices in a week or two, depending on the forecast – and I’ll keep some of the plastic around to pop back on if we have another of those mid-May frosts. Tomato plants planted outside this early, even with protection, don’t tend to grow much, so I don’t consider this an ideal situation or even an advantage, just a necessary improvisation – I simply had no place to put those plants! If my cold frames were taller, I’d stick them in there.

Speaking of cold frames – here are mine pictured last month when the cabbages were still hardening off –

– I love them, but I was reminded of the disadvantage of lightweight aluminum and plastic yesterday when I went outside to close them for the night (they’ve got some flower, lettuce, and mung bean seedlings in them now) and stopped, dumbfounded, swearing that I had possessed two cold frames last I looked, wondering if there was a cold frame thief operating in my neighborhood… until I realized that one of them had blown completely away and was lodged a few feet downhill by my garden fence, luckily undamaged. It’s now weighted down by a plank of wood.

What are your favorite ways of protecting plants when they need a little extra help?

Favas and soybeans and snow peas, oh my!

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This is your Round Up the Beans and Peas post – a quick overview of the food plants we’re emphasizing this year, and how they fit together taxonomically and geographically. You may think taxonomy is boring (it’s not!) but getting a sense of vegetables’ family trees helps you with planning seed-saving – which plants will cross with each other and which won’t? – and understanding degrees of susceptibility to pests and diseases.

So let’s start at the top: all beans and peas are members of the family Fabaceae, which you’ll also see called Leguminosae. The latter sounds familiar because all these plants are also called legumes. Fabaceae is a huge family containing a lot of edible and inedible plants, most of which fall outside our bean and pea world. Just to name a few: alfalfa, peanuts, indigo, lupins, carob, tamarind, clover, mimosa, locust, and laburnum are all part of this clan.

So let’s toss most of those aside for the moment. “Bean” and “pea” are still pretty flexible terms, and generally refer to lots of related plant genera that produce edible seeds inside pods. You know it when you see it, I guess. 🙂 So what beans and peas might we be growing to celebrate this 2015 Grow It Eat It year?

Borlotto beans

First, beans from the wonderful Phaseolus genus. These are the beans native to the Americas, including the common bean, P. vulgaris, which can be grown either to eat the entire pod while green (or another color) or to harvest the seeds when fresh (shelling beans) or dry. Green beans, filet beans, flat-podded Romano beans, cool-looking purple pole beans, canned black or kidney beans, pages of crazy-looking dry beans in seed catalogs: all of those are P. vulgaris.

Runner bean

Then there are runner beans, P. coccineus, grown mainly for their lovely flowers but quite edible; P. lunatus or lima beans, and several other edible species as well.

But beans don’t just belong to the Americas; they’re native to places all over the world. Old World beans include those in the genera Vicia (V. faba, the fava or broad bean, the source of the family’s Latin name), Vigna (cowpeas, yardlong beans, moth beans, azuki beans, mung beans, and others), Cicer (chickpeas), Glycine (soybeans), Lens (lentils), and many more.

Hyacinth bean

One of the prettiest Old World beans is the hyacinth bean, Lablab purpureus, which produces purple beans and lovely lavender flowers on long vines. Harvest flowers, leaves, and immature beans from this plant for your meals! You can get both beauty and nutrition from many members of the bean family.

Snow peas

We’ll also be growing and reporting on lots of peas this year. By “pea” we mean mostly the species Pisum sativum, although there are other plants in the legume family that can be called peas.

Garden peas are usually divided into three types: snow peas, which are eaten as flat pods before the seeds develop much; snap peas, edible-podded with the seeds swollen inside; and shelling peas, which you take out of the pod before eating. They are cool-season plants, best grown in the spring and fall. (Fava beans also prefer cool weather, but most beans can’t tolerate chilly temperatures and are grown in the summer.)

Most peas and beans have similar-shaped and usually quite lovely flowers (resembling those of their relatives, the non-edible ornamental sweet pea). Here are a trio of leguminous flowers: a purple-flowered pea, a cowpea, and a peanut. Pretty enough for the flowerbed, but also delicious for your dinner.

Pea (by Nancy Taylor Robson)
Cowpea (by Darlene Nicholson)
Peanut (by Darlene Nicholson)

Low tunnels

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So, I thought I would bring you up to date on my low tunnel experiment.  I didn’t get a chance to put a low tunnel to work in my garden, but did get one installed in Mary’s raised bed on Saturday March 15.  The bed we used was her 4 by 12 foot bed which is bordered by 2 by 12s.  The bed is filled with manufactured soil (50% leafgro-50% soil) and fertilized with 10-10-10 (one pound) to add .2 lbs. of N per 100 square feet.  This picture shows the partially planted bed.

Plantings in the bed are Packman broccoli, tatsoi, Tuscan kale, Red Sails and Butter Crunch lettuce.  The full planted bed looks like this.  
The PVC hoops are spaced about two and a half feet apart and tied together using another piece of PVC pipe at the top of the hoops and either tied or taped in place.  The plastic cover is 4 mil plastic purchased at a local hardware store.  It was stretched over the hoops, wrapped around some 1 by 2 the furring strips and attached to the 2 by 12s using screws.  The ends were loose so that the low tunnel could be ventilated, less it build up to much heat and cook the plants.
This last picture shows the impact of 9 inches of Howard County snow, we received Sunday night and Monday.  Mary told me that late in the day she had to open up one end of the low tunnel because the interior had a lot of condensation on the plastic sheeting.  Hopefully these plants will like their new environment and provide some early April and May greens and broccoli for Mary’s table.  The only thing left to do is to install the drip irrigation since plastic isn’t permeable. 
.  
I’ll update this experiment with low tunnels, but Mary should have great success as long as she remember to ventilate it on sunny days.

Side yard garden with critter fence

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Finding the best spot for a home food garden can be a challenge. The backyard is usually the location of choice but may be too shady, sloped, wet, etc. There has been a small but growing movement to convert front yards to vegetable gardens and edible landscapes. A few years ago a neighbor created an attractive side yard vegetable and herb garden that blends nicely into the landscape. It’s a wonderful example of how to make a yard more interesting, beautiful, and useful!

 The two-part fence- wire mesh at the bottom for rabbits and groundhogs, and black deer netting at the top- is supported by pieces of bamboo. The fence is only about 5 ft. tall which makes it less noticeable and more in scale with the house and landscape. There are many deer in the neighborhood but none have jumped in, perhaps because the garden is small and right next to the house.

Hibiscus sabdariffa

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One of our favorite plants this year at the Derwood Demo Garden is Hibiscus sabdariffa, or roselle hibiscus (or sorrel, sour-leaf, flor de Jamaica, and many other names).  It is an Old World plant (Africa and Asia) that is also grown extensively in the West Indies.  In its natural warm habitat, it can be a woody shrub, but here it’s grown as an annual.  I started the seeds inside in March and by July it was over two feet tall.

The roselle flower looks a lot like that of okra; they’re in the same plant family, Malvaceae.  One of the useful parts of the plant is the flower bud:

which is picked when about an inch long and completely red.  To make a simple nutritious infusion, use 2-3 buds per measured cup of water, and simmer the buds in the water for about ten minutes until the water is a rich red.  You can drink this tea hot or cold, and add herbs to it for variety.  The commercially sold Red Zinger tea has roselle hibiscus as its base.

MG Millicent Lawrence told me how roselle or “sorrel” is used in Jamaica for a winter drink (alcoholic).  Here’s her recipe:

Jamaican Sorrel

Ingredients (makes about 2-3 pints of liquid)
1 cup dried sorrel buds
2 Tbs grated ginger (no need to peel)
5 cups boiling water
10-20 allspice (pimento) berries.  If the allspice berries are large (pea size) use the lower amount
rum and sugar to taste
wine (optional)
Place the sorrel, ginger, and allspice in a large container and pour in the boiling water.  Cover and let steep overnight.  Strain through cheesecloth or a fine meshed sieve to remove all solids.  Add a little rum to preserve and sugar to sweeten, and wine if desired.  Pour into a glass bottle and refrigerate.  The end product should be a rich ruby-colored spicy beverage.

You could also use fresh buds for this, but you’d need much more than a cup, and you’d need to infuse them, not just pour boiling water on.  Dried sorrel or flor de Jamaica can be found at Hispanic groceries.

credit Barbara Dunn

This aerial shot of the demo garden was taken from a kite flown by the indefatigable MG Barbara Dunn.

You can see our fat patch of roselle hibiscus next to the blue-green coiled hose.  There are perhaps seven plants in there – I can’t remember now – and the patch is about seven feet long.

Here’s a closeup of the pretty leaves – look, no bug damage!  And it turns out the leaves are edible as well.  I’d read this but hadn’t tried them, and then a very nice Burmese-American visitor to our garden saw the plant and recognized it and asked for some leaves to show us how it was cooked – and the next week we got a dish with “sour leaf” and bamboo shoots to sample.

I took some home that night and cooked them, but I won’t post the recipe because I’m still working on it.  The leaves have a strong sour taste that needs to be complemented with other tastes, and the Indian spices I used weren’t strong enough to do the trick.  I ought to have properly caramelized the onions, too.

Here’s a shot of my dinner, accompanied by a glass of roselle infusion.  I served the roselle greens on a chickpea flour pancake (recipe here, from a delightful food blog).

So give roselle a try in your vegetable or flower patch next year!  The seeds are available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and other sources (more next year, I expect, since this is a hot plant in the food gardening world right now).