[Garden] Garden Summary 2008

[Paul Nijjar]

Well, given that it is snowing I guess gardening season is over. I
threw together a summary of the garden this year. Here is the draft. I
will take comments into account and post a final version to the WPIRG
website next week. 

- Paul

2008 Summary
============

The overriding theme of the 2008 gardening season was rain. In stark
contrast to 2007, we watered the garden fewer than five times all
season.

Unfortunately, many of our garden Sundays and Wednesdays were washed
out, so it was difficult to sustain a steady volunteer base.
Nonetheless, a core group of 5-10 people came out when the weather was
pleasant enough to work, and on some sunny afternoons fifteen people
joined us.

Crops
-----

All of the plants in the onion family did well this year. The garlic
we planted in the fall of 2007 did phenomenally well, and some
volunteer garlic that had died out in the hot summer bounced back.
Garlic scapes proved to be a tender and delicious treat.

Our leeks also proved to be a big success. We planted two beds of
them, and watching them grow from spindly frail plant strands to thick
delicious vegetables was rewarding. We did not harvest all of the
leeks we planted, but as they winter well the gardeners of 2009 will
be able to enjoy the surplus harvest.

This year we successfully planted some unusual crops. Three
artichoke plants thrived, and one of them unexpectedly produced some
artichokes for us to enjoy. In anticipation of future harvests we
planted some asparagus plants which survived and will hopefully yield
harvest in future years. We planted raspberries which produced a few
fruits, and the strawberry plants we transplanted did surprisingly
well, producing berries well into October.

Our eggplants were attacked by flea beetles early in the season. We
lost faith in them, but they showed us a thing or two by bouncing back
and producing some fruit. Although not as exuberant as last year, our
peppers and tomatoes did reasonably well (although the tomatoes were
afflicted by a blight). This year we planted more sweet peppers than
hot ones, which was probably a wise decision.

Squash and watermelon got off to a slow start, but they also ended up
thriving.  Our watermelons did not ripen until the very end of the
season, however.

For some reason our beets and chard struggled this year.

We planted a row of nasturtiums as a decoy plant for flea beetles. This
strategy did not quite work, but our nasturtiums grew hale and hearty, and
provided delicious flowers and spicy leaves for salads.

Because the season was reasonably cool this year, we had reasonable
success planting lettuces. We also planted a later crop of lettuce and
radish that was slow but did okay.

One pleasant surprise was that our potatoes did significantly better
than last year. This may be because we rototilled the potato beds
fairly deeply, and we mounded extra soil on top of the beds for the
potatoes. At least one of the potato plants produced big red potatoes
that any grocery store would be proud of. Given the high clay content
of our soil this was a good accomplishment.

We once again had several volunteer crops: the aforementioned garlic,
several tomato plants and quite a bit of fennel.

Soil and Other Infrastructure
-----------------------------

We added a truckful of compost to the garden this year, which helped
quite a few crops. We had plans to add sand to the beds to offset the
incredible clay content, but unfortunately there was a mix-up with the
supplier, and this did not happen.

Several people donated carpet, which along with a load of woodchips we
used to reinforce the garden paths.  We made arrangements with Food
Services to get compost (and lots of plastic buckets!) for our
composter. We successfully made a few deliveries, and would like to
establish a more regular collection schedule in the future.

Disease and Pests
-----------------

Bindweed continued to taunt us this year, although thanks to diligent
weeding we managed to keep it more-or-less under control. We had some
discussion of whether we should be throwing bindweed into the compost
for fear that it just spreads the weed, but we did not implement any
consistent practices here. We did keep most of the blighted tomato
plants out of our compost, however.

Our tomatoes did get blight this year. Suspiciously, the blight
started in the same bed in which our celery and cabbages suffered from
rot last year.

Although our squashes did fairly well, they were afflicted with both striped
cucumber beetles and ugly grey squash bugs.

Perhaps the most frustrating mammalian pest this year were the
groundhogs, which decimated our peas, beans, lettuce and brassicas.
Putting fences around individual beds did help a bit, but we lost
several crops. We almost managed to get a fence put up this year; but
stalled when it came to verifying post locations with the Region of
Waterloo. Hopefully the gardeners of 2009 will succeed in finishing
the fencing project to keep critters away.

In addition to groundhogs mice ate some of our peppers and radishes,
and we have suspicions that the deer again visited us to nibble on our
pepper plants.

Maddy Rosamond prepared a photographic catalogue of weeds and pests for the
garden this year. It is available on Facebook [WHERE?].




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