[Garden] Garden Summary 2008

[J. Rochon]

Paul,
         Thank you. This is an excellent summary.
> 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?].
>
>
>
>
>       __________________________________________________________________
> Instant Messaging, free SMS, sharing photos and more... Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger at http://ca.beta.messenger.yahoo.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Garden mailing list
> Garden at lists.wpirg.org
> http://lists.wpirg.org/mailman/listinfo/garden_lists.wpirg.org
>