The Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour at The Urban Farm on August 8th.

There will be a free open to the public tour of The Urban Farm at Southeast Ohio Regional Kitchen on Tuesday August 8th at 6:30 pm as part of The Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour as well as a celebration of Ohio Local Foods week.

 

Come visit The Urban Farm to see our process.  Bring your friends and your questions and hear about our current plans for produce production and plans for expansion in 2018.

 

Fall Vegetable Planting Timeline

Fall is a great time to harvest vegetables.  The weather is cooler,  the bugs not as bad, you still have some sunlight and the rain is a little more regular than summer.  To have a fall vegetable harvest you need to do a little planning to time your harvest to the frost date.  Our frost free date in Hocking is around the middle of October.  As of July 9th, we have around a little under 100 days of growing left.  Honestly that means you can still grow almost anything.

Start right now:

  • Asian cabbage, heading cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower – under the lights would be best.  I will start mine shortly in my Seed Start Grow Station.  Starting them indoors avoids high summer heat on fragile cabbage family transplants.  They will go out around Labor Day.  They do not mind cool weather and are improved by a touch of frost.

Lettuce and Asian cabbages are great plants to start with when you are learning to start seeds. They germinate rapidly and reliably and take to transplanting very well.

  • Feel free to start some lettuce indoors now as well.   A dozen heads of lettuce to start, and then repeat that every two weeks for the next month or two.  You might lose some if August is blazing or you might have homegrown lettuce to go with your BLT.
  •  Plant another row of green beans as well as start another few zucchini/yellow squash plants.  You have plenty of time to mature them,  trust me.
  • Direct seed some green onions and carrots now.  These will be tricky because they both take weeks to germinate as well as do not like to break through a hard dry soil crust.  They both tolerate cold later on and you get a harvest into October or November. 

  • If you did not do potatoes early on and you have some space go ahead and plant seed potatoes.  They will be buried under soil and mulch and you will have some in fall. 
  • Hold off a little bit for sugar snap peas, maybe another two weeks,  then start them as well.
  • You can direct seed another round of cucumbers now.  Then you have some to go with your lettuce and tomatoes for a nice fall salad.
  • Hold off about 3-4 weeks before you start radishes and beets.  They both grow pretty fast and taste way better when they mature in the fall.
  • Direct seed another round of Basil right now.  Then you have some later in the season that you are not having to cut all the time to keep in under control

Just a few ideas to get you started.  Mix in some row cover on some of the veggies and you can have a harvest that easily lasts to Thanksgiving.

 

Start Scouting for Harlequin Bug

Hocking County had a serious problem last growing season with Harlequin bug damage on crucifers.  Any plant that was not monitored with hand picking or treated with insecticide was severely damaged up to complete loss of product.  I have not seen this pest up in Columbus where I garden although I am sure it is on its way.  It is normally a southern pest but has been moving north with the temperatures like all the rest of the bugs. When I did the garden walk at The Logan Community garden last year I noticed that all the brussel sprouts had been chewed to bits by this guy:

August 2016 pic

Scouting started in mid-May with the first bugs noted at The Urban Farm on June 13th.

Feeding damage from the bugs is noted on the leaf in the form of white stippling. Large holes were caused by feeding of Cabbage White larvae

Hand picking was used to remove the several bugs noted instead of insecticide to allow harvest of the remaining broccoli.  The planting beds will be rotated out of broccoli within the next couple weeks and no other cruciferous vegetables will be planted until August, but scouting will continue.

In your gardens, especially if you have a long season brassica like brussel sprouts, you will need to do extensive hand picking as well as monitor for egg cases.  Consider using an insecticide as well.  More pics and treatment options in the links below.

Harlequin bug (Murgantia histrionica) –>  Profile: Journal of Integrated Pest Management

Factsheet: University of Maryland

OSU Vegnet photo identification

Vertical Gardening Experiments

One of the best ways to increase harvest as well as maximize garden space is to grow upward.  Fencing, trellis material, bamboo poles, etc all have a small ground footprint but allow plants to use the vertical instead of just the horizontal.  In the various gardens here in Hocking I have some small experiments going on that I wanted to share.  Hopefully these give you some ideas to take home.

First up is The Urban Farm:

One of my favorite trellis items is cattle panel.  It is not expensive,  will last longer than me, and I am not sure I can break it.  I cut a 16 foot length in half.  I can do a four foot high trellis 8 foot long or an 8 foot high trellis four foot long.  Here is a couple ideas.  The trellis is zip tied at the top in a steep triangle shape.

Sugar snap peas almost completely covering the cattle panel. I thick plant pea seed way past recommendations. This is possible because I know the compost medium I planted in has some serious fertility to handle the nutrient need

Same concept with tomatoes. Can reach through the panel to harvest tomatoes easily. Will bear a ton of weight without any problems. Clip the zip ties at the end of the season to store the panel.

Next up is Bishop Educational Gardens:

If you missed last week’s Edible Landscaping – Beauty and the Feast workshop you did not get a chance to see the amazingly cool raised beds constructed by a relative of our Hocking County volunteer superstar Andy J.

Seriously. Raised beds made from hardwood facings from logging. Genius. Why did I not think of that?

It is tough to tell from this pic but there are three tiers of height. From L to R, eggplant and peppers, tomatoes, then planted pole beans. This will grow up to be a wall of colors, shapes, and textures that are edible. It is a one side view when standing on the road at the left. The trellis will be bamboo poles sourced from the grounds.

 

Last up is The Children’s Garden at the fairgrounds:

I showed you recently how I am doing tomatoes planted with espalier technique on chain link fence.  That will be dynamite I am hoping.  My other vertical experiments are with pole beans using two types of support; one living and one telephone.

Pole beans, var. Christmas Lima, from my friend Sarolin from saved seed here in Logan. They will be able to grow up the telephone pole support wire freely. I am curious to see how high they get.

This is a sunflower plant. I planted pole beans around the base of the plant. They will have a symbiotic relationship. The beans will use the flower as support while providing nutrition to the flower from nitrogen fixing.

I have two support wires for the telephone pole in front of my office to use. This one is getting seeded with pole black beans from Hocking County saved seed from my gardener/chicken friend Beth M.

Lastly. This is a mouse melon plant. It produces grape sized fruit that look like watermelon. This plant is in the ground by the telephone support wire that have the lima beans. This plant will also benefit from nitrogen fixing from the pole beans.

Hopefully you get some ideas to use in your garden.  The trellis/support will allow me to use limited space for maximum harvest over the course of the season.

 

Tomato Planting Time

I took the opportunity to plant tomatoes at two different locations that I help maintain here in Hocking.   My target date for tomato planting is usually around Memorial Day.   That avoids almost any chance of a late frost as well as allows the critical soil warming tomatoes need.  Tomato plants will stop uptake of nutrients from their roots if temps are too low.   That is also why I told folks to hold off planting in April even though we had some great weather.   The past week had very high temps for most of the week(perfect to warm soil), then moderate temps with rain for the ten days following.  Perfect to plant and then have a good source of water for the new transplants.

First up was the Children’s Educational Garden here at the fairgrounds.  Here is the spot:

Four raised beds filled with compost. Great sun exposure, up against chain link fence.

Last year I planted a couple cherry tomatoes and then trellised them along the fence.  It worked great.  I tied the vines horizontally in a modified espalier technique.  It allowed tremendous production and I was able to keep the vines at kid level so they could easily harvest.

Building on that I started seedlings for six different colors of cherry tomato in my seed start grow station.  That will give us way more that can possibly be eaten but I was looking for a colorful effect.   I am a little worried about following tomatoes with tomatoes in back to back years and not following correct rotation.  I will only be able to do an every other year rotate.  I do heavily mulch and we reapply compost.  I will keep a close eye for disease.  Cherry tomatoes have shown they can out grow the blight so I am not super worried.

L -> R: White, Red, Chocolate, Orange, Green and Yellow.

The mulch is mission critical.  It smothers weeds, keeps the soil cool(not cold), prevents moisture loss as well as provides a barrier to the fungal spores in the soil that splash on the leaves and cause most of the tomato diseases.  That is why I had to wait until the soil warmed.  The mulch would have slowed warm up.

 

Next up The Urban Farm:

We are planning to use 2 of our 6 beds in tomatoes.  One of each of the two different growing media.  I want to see how they do in comparison.  The trellis method here is different.  I am using cattle panel that are zip tied into a steep triangle.  This will allow easy harvest and the panel will last years.

dark soil is a mark of lots of organic matter.

Tomatoes are one of the only plants that should be buried deeper than where they were growing in their container.  This is because they will grow roots off the stem below the ground which makes a stronger plant. I pinched off the lower branches and leaves and planted them in 10 inch deep holes.  Then comes the mulch.  I put about 3-4 inches deep hay around the plants.  I will add more as the plants grow.

14 plants per bed, 28 tomatoes total.

The asphalt next to the right side bed will keep the heat in.  This might hurt the plant in high summer heat.  I put cherry tomatoes in that bed as they do less blossom drop due to heat.  Now I just need to get my home plants in.

Urban Farm Spring Update

It is amazing to me to see the old pictures of when we first started the raised beds.

Now we have some fertile growing media and are in full swing for spring harvest.  The cover crops have been terminated and mowed and are getting ready for tomatoes, beans, and peppers.  It is still too early to plant those, but not too early to get the space ready to go.

 

I got the trellis up for the sugar snaps and if the deer do not eat them we will have a fine harvest.  I am using cattle panel as my trellis as it will last for many seasons.  I am going to do the same when I trellis the tomatoes.  I mulched with hay to keep the weeds down and the soil moist for this cool season crop

 

Carrots take quite some time to germinate and get started but they are coming on now and will be part of the produce boxes for the seniors in a month or two.  I will start lots more later in the season.

Senior Farmer’s Market voucher season starts this week and I am hoping to add radishes to the spinach, lettuce and broccoli.

The Urban Farm – April Update

So my last post back on April 2nd showed snow on the raised beds.   We had planted about 40 or so transplants to take advantage of an early warm up then put some row cover season extension over the plants for protection.  Lettuce and broccoli are generally cold tolerant but the weather was in the teens for an extended period of time plus I did not have time to set my low tunnel up correctly so I was thinking we would have some loss.  And we did.  But not too bad.

First week of April after hard long hard freeze period

 

No worries.  We pulled dead plants and put in new ones.  That is why you have a seed start grow station at your house and you plant every two weeks.  Having a dozen plants ready each week or two ensures a steady stream of produce.  We had nice weather with decent rainfall and it shows.

Here is that same bed a couple weeks later.

Lettuce is interplanted with broccoli and cauliflower.  We will harvest the largest heads to allow the smaller heads to get bigger as the broccoli and cauliflower grow to maturity.  We have about 30 heads of lettuce going in a separate part of the farm for later on.

I need to find a few hours this week to work at the farm.  The peas are coming up and if the bunnies and deer do not eat them they will need a trellis in a week or two.  Targeted harvest for sugar snap peas is early June.