Greenhouse Tragedy

Well, today was a day of serial fails. I wrote in an earlier post that the Norkotah potatoes hadn't come up yet. I was incorrect. The Norkotahs are coming up fairly well, though not as robustly as the Yukon Golds or Bintjes, but of the Rose Finns, only a single tuber has sprouted. That was fail #1.

As I worked, on the potatoes, I noticed that my second seeding of beets was coming up nicely, so I decided to check on the first seeding of beets, carrots, and onions. I peeled off the row covers, and to my considerable dismay, I found nothing but weeds in the carrot bed, two or three straggly onions, and three sad looking beets. What could have happened? All of the beets and carrots were sprouting quite happily in other beds. Well, when I pulled up the row covers, I noticed a lot of what looked like small houseflies under the cloth. After some investigation, I've concluded that they're fungus gnats, and their larvae ate all my seedlings. This is another good reason why we plant successively. Now, I've seen these gnats all over the garden, and they haven't been doing anywhere near that amount of damage in any bed that doesn't have a row cover. My guess is that the row covers were protecting the gnats from their natural predators. So I ran around and stripped all the row covers off of everything, and everything else seems fine: lettuce, gala mache, Ovation greens, and swiss chard. I left the row cover on the leeks, which were coming up nicely, because they were still so teensy. That was fail #2.

Now for the epic fail:

CRASH!

I brought these into the greenhouse last weekend after using them for the Memorial Day seedling sale. They were balanced a bit precariously, and Alex helped me shift the legs to be more stable, but clearly not stable enough. Argh. All the big tomatoes were on that shelf (which may well have contributed to its tipping over), along with the vast majority of my Sungolds. I recovered and repotted as many of the tomatoes as I could.

Survivors of the Crash

Note the completely empty shelf on bottom. Before the crash, they were all completely packed, minus one tray of Valencias I'd removed for repotting. But the worst thing about this is that, when these fell, I lost the markers for most of them. The leftmost two trays on the second shelf are all unlabeled tomatoes. I can make educated guesses, but I can't guarantee they are what I think they are, so I can't sell them. I think I'll donate them all to the Beverly Bootstraps Community Garden, if they'll take them. They're mostly Sun Golds and Bellstars, I think, both of which will do well in a community garden. I'll wait a day or two to see how many of them recover.

In every disaster, there's a teachable moment. Here's mine: use old nylons or tights to tie up your tomatoes.

Old ballet tights get a new life as tomato ties.

The fabric will stretch with the plant as it grows, supporting it without strangling it.

And lest you think the day was a total loss, I did get the potatoes mounded.

Yukon Gold (left) and Bintje potatoes in their trenches.

A single Bintje rising from the trench.

Bintje now happily mounded.

All the happy mounded potatoes.

I'll continue doing this as they grow, heaping more and more soil around the stems to encourage tuber development.

Finally, I noticed one curious difference in the Yellow Crookneck summer squash seedlings.

The pot makes a difference.

The seedling on the far right looks happy and healthy and green. The one to its left is much smaller and yellower. The difference? The one on the left is in a CowPot, and the one on the right in a coir pot. This surprised me quite a bit, since CowPots are basically both container and fertilizer in one, but perhaps they're just a bit too much fertilizer for summer squash. Other seedlings, such as zinnias, did significantly better in CowPots than in coir pots. I should do a trial next year with several different seedling varieties to see which pots work best for each species.

Well, I wanted more space in the greenhouse, and I got it with a vengeance. I did make use of the space to repot some Olympus Bell and Sweet Chocolate bell peppers, which are finally starting to shoot up, as well as the last four Little Leaf cucumbers and last two Kabocha winter squash. Tomorrow, Delicata, Lemon Basil, and, of course, more tomatoes.

Harborlight-Stoneridge Montessori School Benefit Sale

In an effort to clear out some of our greenhouse stock, we're holding a benefit sale now until June 5th. Half of all proceeds go to Harborlight-Stoneridge Montessori School. And we're extending the Memorial Day prices:

2-3" pots - $1
5" pots - $2
8" or larger - $4
6 packs of marigolds - $2

The zucchini is all gone, and the cukes are going fast, but we still have a TON of tomatoes. Also lots of basil, chile peppers, summer squash, winter squash, and pumpkins.

Basil, Tomatoes, and Cukes: Oh, My!

Today's selling went a lot better than yesterdays. The surprise hit: cucumbers! A few people mentioned that they'd like to grow cucumbers but just didn't think they had the space. I explained the principles of vertical gardening and steered them toward the Little Leaf cukes. Both the plants and their fruit are small and fit well into the nooks and crannies of a garden (or a greenhouse, which is why I bought that seed in the first place).

Actually, I spent a surprising amount of time explaining and demonstrating gardening techniques, such as how to rabbit-proof your garden, how to seed lettuce, how to mound squash. I'm wondering whether I should start offering a Basics of Backyard Gardening course. How many of you would be interested in such a class? What would you like to see in the curriculum? And where shall I hold it? Ideally, I'd do it here so that I can demonstrate some of the techniques, but that might be a bit of a hike for some of you.

At any rate, I sold enough tomatoes, cukes, basil, the very last zucchini, and assorted other veggie seedlings this weekend to give myself some wiggle room in the greenhouse at last. Next week, more mad potting.

Meanwhile, today I finished prepping the last of the garden beds, and Alex finished setting up the header and added a few lengths of drip tape to the irrigation system. It's a lovely feeling, knowing that most of the garden is planted and cooking. Here's how things were looking last Wednesday:

Happy strawberries are growing like mad. Note the irrigation header on the right.

Cucumbers for Beverly Bootstraps

And some cukes for us.

The red trellises are tomato ladders that I'm trying out this year. I have a Brandywine planted on one end and a Hillbilly planted on the other. After planting the cukes, I realized I had a fair amount of space on either side of the bed, so I planted some extra carrots. On the right, I planted Nantes and Bolero, and on the left I planted Kaleidescope Mix. Now, if I'd thought of this before planting the cukes, I'd have put the fencing on the north (right) side of the bed so that the cukes wouldn't be shading half the carrots later on.

Zigzagging Melons

I did something a little different for the melons. Here I've planted Sweet Siberian watermelons, Yellow Doll watermelons, and Sweet Granite cantaloupes in a zigzag pattern to maximize growing space for the vines. Once the eggplants are large enough, I plan to plant two Orient Express and two Ravenna Green in the triangular spaces away from the fence.

Oops! Didn't quite cover all the Ovation Greens braising/salad mix.

Annelise's Giant Pumpkin

I really should have put an object next to this to help indicate its size. Giant is right! Each of those leaves is larger than my hand. Annelise saw the giant pumpkins at last year's Topsfield County Fair and insisted that she wanted to grow one. So we bought a small packet of 3 seeds, two of them came up, and we planted the more robust of the two. The other is promised to her best friend. Our plan is to let it grow in among the corn, which has just sprouted in the last day or two.

A mixed bed of zucchini (foreground), tomatoes, and husk cherries.

Husk cherries are essentially a sweet tomatillo, and this variety is reputed to taste like pineapple. We shall see.

I bet you're wondering: Why on earth isn't she putting down black plastic mulch cover on these things to prevent weeds? Well, here's your answer:

How Not to Mulch. Seriously.

These are Yellow Crookneck summer squash plants. I used a solid black plastic bought from a small farm supplier in NH. When I asked for black plastic mulch cover that was water-permeable, the salesman said, "We only have solid, but that's fine. You run your drip tape under the plastic." I really wish I'd stopped to think about that for a second. The problem with solid plastic, as you can see from the photo, is that rainwater pools and runs off, forcing you to use the drip tape a lot more than you otherwise would. I'm seriously annoyed by this. I could see using it someplace like New Mexico, where you'd irrigate a lot and want a plastic barrier to prevent evaporation, but this is New England, where it rains frequently, and with this stuff, I can't make use of the rain. Worse, other beds on the same drip tape probably don't need watering as frequently. So if anyone prefers this solid stuff, I have a whole roll of it for you. I will likely never use it again.

I have so many tomatoes in the greenhouse that, rather than scattering them randomly about the garden as I usually do to prevent the spread of wilt and parasites, I dedicated a bed previously earmarked for flowers to them. And here's a tip I'd include in my hypothetical class:

Bury Your Tomatoes

These two Valencia tomato plants were the same height before planting. Tomatoes are vines in the nightshade family, and they grow roots all along their stem, just as potatoes do. The more stem you put in the ground, the stronger and healthier they'll be.

I didn't bother taking pictures of the potato beds that day because there was nothing really to see. But the very next day...

Bintje Potato Sprouting

The Bintjes and Yukon Golds sprouted beautifully and are growing big and bushy now. Tomorrow or the next day, I'll start burying them, little by little, to encourage more root, and thus more tuber, development, just as with the tomatoes. Today, the Rose Finns just began to sprout, so I'm guessing the Norkotah aren't far behind. Our hope is that either the Bintjes or the Rose Finns will give us new potatoes by midsummer, i.e., the summer solstice.

First Strawberry

Also, that day, I spotted the first strawberry blossoms. Alas, we have to pick them all off and forego our strawberries this year to have healthier plants and a better harvest next year. Fortunately, I have a farmhand who loves picking flowers. Seriously, most of our roses never make it to a full bloom.

Eleanor, the Fashionista Farmhand

There's very little left to plant in the garden. I have a bunch of Mammoth sunflowers I want to get in the ground, as well as the Delicata and Spaghetti squashes. Still waiting for the eggplants to mature enough to plant. I have two more successions of corn planned, and we'll be direct seeding the beans sometime in the next week. That should be an interesting blog post. Finally, I have one last flowerbed waiting for my mother-in-law to come and seed wildflowers in it. And then, I can just sit back and water. And weed. And harvest.

Specificity

I'm out here manning the seedling sale, and I've had not a single customer. Thus far, three cars have driven up, taken a look, and driven away. I'm guessing they were looking for flowers, not veggies. Alex has gone out shopping for groceries, and I asked him to pick up two big red posterboards for me. I'm going to write "Heirloom Tomatoes" on them, cut them in the shape of a tomato, and stick them on the easel we have out at the corner of Williams and Elliott Sts. This will at least save people the trouble of driving by.

Also, I'm covered in mosquito bites. We went to Mad Martha's on Plum Island for breakfast, and the instant I stepped out of the car, they pounced on me! I have at least eight welts on my face, neck, and arms. Fortunately, there are no mosquitos here in Beverly. Either that or I'm too drained to be enticing.

Memorial Day Sale!

Seedlings are on sale this weekend! Come on over and pick out the tastiest tomato varieties for your garden.

3" pots - $1
5" pots - $2
8" pots - $4
10% off orders over $30
25% off orders over $50

17 Williams St, Beverly, MA 01915
978-927-1969

We're open noon to 7pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Found in the Compost

I am finally getting down to the bottom of the old compost heap that came with the house, scraping concrete at last. I think I'll get maybe 40 more gallons of useful compost, and the rest will go into the compost tumblers for finishing off. Then I'll take down the old bin with the rotting slats and peeling paint and replace it with... who knows what? A playhouse for the girls? A hen house? Well, we'll see how it looks without the rotting vegetation first.

All season, I've been amused, annoyed, and occasionally astounded by what I've found in the compost, both the heap and the compost we had trucked in for the garden. So far, I've found:

• Pot sherds, both plastic and clay
• Old plant labels
• Entirely too many rocks
• A disturbing amount of broken glass
• Random bits of wire and plastic and twine
• A few coins
• A used toothbrush
• An empty cigarette lighter (but no butts)
• Bits of rusted chain, pipe, and metal
• A whole tire iron, of a rather old design
• These cheeky fellows:

Cast iron compost bugs - not a critter I usually find in the heap.

 But I have to say that my favorite compost find was what greeted me in the bin this morning:

Oysters in the compost.

Yup, those are delicious oyster mushrooms, growing from some spawn in a spent mushroom kit I'd discarded in the compost. I love it when that happens. These babies are destined to be my breakfast tomorrow, along with scrambled eggs and sauteed wild ramps. So, if you happen to find a mushroom growing next to the seedling you bought from me, don't panic. It's probably a beneficial mushroom from the mycological amendments I use, and it might even be a tasty gourmet mushroom. If you're wondering, take a picture and send it to me.

Now, I didn't find these two in the compost, but they're worth sharing anyway.

Annelise waters the newly-planted zucchini.

Eleanor on her way to water the nasturtiums.

Annelise and I planted her giant pumpkin today! She is so excited. She can't wait to grow a champion squash and enter it into the county fair. We'll see if she can keep up with it. Also planted today: Baby Pam and Sugar Pie pumpkins, Kabocha squash, Parthenon zucchini, husk cherries, Little Leaf and Endeavor cukes for Beverly Bootstraps, one Sun Gold cherry tomato, and one Valencia tomato. Tomorrow: more cukes, melons, spinach, delicata and spaghetti squash, some other varieties of tomato, the two varieties of fingerling potatoes, various flowers, and, if I can get the beds finished, corn.

The Peril of the Peas

Last week, the greenhouse was abuzz with - not bees! - drama. The peas were just overgrowing everything, and I had to think of a quick solution. So I got out a trellis net and created a pea hammock!

Hey, look! There's kale under there!

And now the bush beans are safe from strangulation.

The following day, I got a large order for brassicas from a small farm in Westford who lost their entire crop to cutworms. Grr! So I went to the greenhouse to see how many kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower seedlings I had for them. The good news: lots, more than enough kale, plenty of broccoli (though I'm now mostly cleared out of that), and all the remaining brussels sprouts and cauliflower. The bad news: APHIDS. EVERYWHERE.

Apparently, the kale that had previously been overgrown by the peas had become infested with aphids. When I lifted up the pea vines into the hammock, all those aphids looked up, blinked in the sunlight a bit, and said, Hey, look! More kale! Yum! And they ran riot through the greenhouse. Apparently, aphids who like kale also like zinnias, and I actually lost two seedlings to them (not to worry, those of you with zinnia orders, I have more than enough to go around). Oh, how I miss my ladybugs.

So for the next three days, while the rain came down, I was out there sniffling with a cold and spraying with organic insecticidal soap solution. I sprayed three times/day for the first two days, then 2x/day, then once the morning of delivery, and one more time at delivery. I'm pleased to say that by then, there were almost no aphids left, and I've seen very little of them in the greenhouse since. And in the bargain, I nipped nascent thrip and whitefly infestations in the bud, too. Moving my remaining brassicas out to the coldframes has helped, too.

I'm learning a great deal more about parasites, both from direct experience, and from various mailing lists. Aside from aphids, thrips, whiteflies, and cutworms, I've also heard that this is a particularly bad year for wireworms. Look for bright orange, segmented worms in your soil and kill them on sight! I have turned up a few in the compost but none so far in the garden. Keeping my fingers crossed. Nematodes will apparently take care of them, but then what do you do about the tomatoes? Sigh.

Meantime, I'm getting a slow but steady trickle of orders, and I suspect that I'm approaching the breakeven point. I'm hoping that the Beverly Farmers' Market will put me over the top. I'm also planning another craigslist ad featuring tomatoes, which are currently completely overrunning the greenhouse. I keep running out of trays, then space in which to put them, then potting soil, then trays again. But thanks to some donated plastic pots, I am blissfully catching up with the teeny stuff left in the seedling trays: sage, mexican oregano, various flowers. And I'm starting to sell out of a few things, like dill and zucchini (only two left!). If you're considering putting in an order soon, check the updated order form to see what we have left.

The Toll

Well, in all the frantic planting, I have managed to mangle my right knee. After planting the remaining 50 strawberries yesterday, I rose from kneeling, and the back of my knee felt like someone had tenderized it with a small mallet. It looks like I've developed pes anserine bursitis from all the squatting and kneeling I did putting down the rabbit fence and planting like mad. Ow.

But the strawberries are in, and I just have a few broccoli, cauliflower, and kale plants left. While I was scheduled to be planting things like potatoes and cucumbers this weekend, it's so cold and rainy that I think I'm going to hold off another week or two, and that will give my tender tendons time to heal.

I sold $17.50 in seedlings today, my first cash sales. I delivered one order to Cambridge because I happened to be in the area for an appointment. Huzzah! Stuff out of my greenhouse! Also, my coir pots came yesterday evening, so I'll be spending most of tomorrow repotting tomatoes, peppers, zinnias, squash, and some cukes. No rest for the mangled.

Breaks in the Rain

The last week has consisted of vast amounts of potting punctuated by mad dashes into the garden whenever the rain stopped. On Thursday afternoon, when the sun actually broke through the clouds briefly, we finished the vertical portion of the fence, and I planted four different kinds of lettuce, gala mache, peas, carrots, and beets. On Sunday, I finished digging out the garden paths, although some still need correcting, and planted leeks and onions. Today, I got some of the rabbit-proofing down. I took rabbit fencing donated to us, rolled it out, bent half of it lengthwise at a right angle, put the more densely fenced half on the ground outside the garden and attached the remainder upright to the vertical fence. (I'll get photos up soon, I promise!) Theoretically, this will prevent rabbits and other critters from burrowing into the garden. Sadly, I had only about 50 feet of fence. Alex bought more rabbit fence after dinner, and I laid it out until it grew so dark, I nearly lost my wire cutters in the grass. Alas, the fence was only half done.

Even so, this afternoon, I planted 25 seedlings each of Earliglow and Honeoye strawberries along that first 50 foot stretch. At last. They were looking rather bedraggled after almost three weeks in the crisper drawer of the fridge. Tomorrow, if there are any further breaks in the rain, I'll plant 25 each of Jewel and Sparkle, along with broccoli, cauliflower, and kale. It looks like the rain won't really get going until 11am, and that should be plenty of time to get this done. If the weatherman is completely wrong and we get no rain, I'll plant marigolds and nasturtiums as well. If, however, the prediction holds up, I'll be in the greenhouse, rolling, rolling, rolling. At this point, all my crops are seeded. I am getting close to having all the tomatoes in 3" pots, and I'll then move on to cilantro, sage, and most of the flowers.

I sincerely hope the coir pots I ordered arrive soon. I took stock of my seedlings and realized that I needed vastly more 5" pots than I'd ever expected. CowPots, after shipping, cost about $.65 each. Multiply that by, oh, five hundred, and we're talking a hefty investment with no guarantee of return. As much as I love the idea of CowPots, I chose to purchase a less expensive but equally sustainable 5" coir (coconut fiber) pot, which costs less than half as much. And I desperately need them. The tomatoes in 3" pots are growing like mad, particularly the Hillbilly tomatoes, which are really impressing me with their vigorous growth. The squash are literally bursting out of their pots, particularly the two Giant pumpkin seedlings I started especially for Annelise. I repotted them in 8" pots I happened to have lying around.

Thanks to everyone who's put in an order, especially those who passed on my info to their friends and neighbors. I'm hopeful that I'll get at least some of these sold. I am, however, probably going to donate the bulk of the kale to the Beverly Bootstraps Community Garden.

The Rhythm of Potting

I've found a pleasant rhythm for working in the greenhouse. After my husband takes the girls off to school, I head out to the greenhouse and spray everything down with water.  If it's Tuesday, I spend half-an-hour giving everything a nice long drink of fertilizer. I use Neptune's Harvest fish and seaweed fertilizer, well diluted with water. If it's hot inside (and it's often so hot that my glasses steam up the instant I walk in), I open the vents and the front door in the hopes of luring bees in to pollinate my peas and bush beans.

Annelise, super-picky eater, loves fresh peas right off the vine.

Now if only she could find the peas...

And then I get down to potting. I take my largest Tubtrug and fill it up with soil starter: half soil, half compost, plus a little perlite to keep things loose. I mix well with my daughters' shovel, which is just the right size to get into a small tub. I start rolling 3" pots out of newspaper, adding a bit of starter to each of them as I go. When I have an 11x22" tray of pots, I pull down a seedling flat, pick a batch of seedlings that are clearly ready for transfer, and start gently teasing them apart and laying them in the pots. I finish filling the pots, label everything carefully (I'll often have several varieties in one tray), spray it down and set it on an available shelf. Repeat. Rinse. Today, I transplanted 36 Valencia tomatoes, 8 Brandywines, and 6 Sun Golds. That seedling flat is starting to look pretty empty.

When the Tubtrug is only about a third full, I switch to 5" cowpots. I put down a layer of starter in each, then I go find something in a 3" pot that needs more room. Today it was Chile de Arbol, for which I just got an order. I peel off the newspaper and dump it into a smaller Tubtrug full of stuff destined for the compost tumbler. If there are multiple seedlings in the lump of earth I'm holding, I gently tease them apart and deposit them in individual pots and fill up the pot around each seedling with soil.

At this rate, I am rapidly running out of room in the greenhouse, and running through my supply of Cowpots with dizzying speed. I have hundreds of seedlings available to buy, and yet I can't seem to find buyers. Two ads on craigslist (one in Beverly, one in Cambridge/Arlington) have yielded no orders. I have one customer from the girls' school, two from our old haunts in Cambridge, and two friends who are paying in kind. (One is paying in buckets of compost!) That's nowhere near the capacity of my greenhouse. I've been casting about for farmers' markets, but most of them don't start until June. Newburyport's market starts this weekend, but they're full up and have no room for me. I have emails out to several other markets. Right now, my best option may be a flea market in Salem, NH.

If anyone has suggestions for where I can hawk my seedlings, please let me know. And bear in mind that the profit margin here is slim at best. Any advertising will probably eat that dubious profit. As it is, I'm not sure paying $30-40 for a vendor space at a farmers' market will be worthwhile, but I hate to see all these seedlings go to waste. Worst case, I may just donate them to area community gardens.

Sixteen Middle Schoolers, Two Idealists, One Teacher, and a Whole Lot of Shovels

Wow, it takes a rainy day on the farm to get caught up on paperwork and blogging. I've been so busy with digging and fencing and potting and seeding and fertilizing... well, you get the idea. It took me nearly a week to get around to posting about one of the coolest things we've gotten to do with our teensy farm.

On Wednesday, April 25th, all the students of Harborlight Montessori School's middle school and one of their teachers, Jackson Tingle, came to our little farm and tore up the garden... on purpose. They came bearing shovels and rakes and lots of energy, and they literally dug in. Among the tasks they accomplished:

• Digging out 75% of the garden paths
• Raking out the garden beds thus created
• Spreading wood chips in some of the paths
• Constructing two pea trellises out of tree branches and netting
• Planting peas at one of the trellises
• Rolling pots and planting pumpkins in the greenhouse

And they did it all in less than two hours. Here are a few of the photos from this momentous occasion.

Our Farmhands, the Middle Schoolers of Harborlight Montessori School

We dug garden paths...

...and dug more garden paths.

It turns out that digging in a straight line is a lot harder than it looks.

The Pea Trellis Team did a great job creating a pea trellis out of tree branches and netting. All produce from this bed will be donated to the Beverly Bootstraps food pantry.

Our own pantry was well stocked. Teacher Jackson Tingle and three of his students dig in to homemade whole grain bread, veggies, fruit salad, chips, crackers, and salsa.

We had a blast with these farmers-in-training, and we hope they'll come back to help us harvest those peas for Beverly Bootstraps. Thanks, guys! You and your shovels are welcome anytime.