Lots of gardens going on in my life right now.  Thought I would give a heads up on what is happening in them.

First off is the Children’s Educational Garden here at the fairgrounds:

It has been doing well.  The kids were able to cook and taste green beans, peas, leeks, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes and parsley.  Their programming is over for the summer as it is back-to-school time here soon.    Feel free to head to the garden and help yourself to the vegetables that are there.  They are meant to be shared.  If you have no garden at your house you can still get fresh tomatoes here.   Pretty soon I will be planting the fall lettuce, spinach and radishes.

Next up is the Container Garden at Hocking Valley Community Hospital:

We are finally getting some rain which means I do not have to water as much and for that I am grateful.  The vegetables in the containers are doing great and I am looking forward to the upcoming Container Gardening Class at HCVH on Wednesday September 7th at 6pm.

I planted some different beet varieties in one pot and a mix of carrots and green onions in another one.  They should mature nicely for the upcoming HVCH 50th Anniversary.

The last update is my home garden, specifically the Sorghum X Sudangrass cover crop I planted in the spring.  I mowed it to 2 feet tall and then watched it basically sit there and wondered if I did it wrong, but it is coming back and with all that rain I expect it to get back to giant sized in no time.

Keep working in your garden.  We are now heading into a good growing season.  Most fall stuff can tolerate a little cold and it even will improve their flavor.  Monitor water and consider putting in some fertilizer for any crops that have been growing all season.

The Sorghum X Sudangrass cover crop that I planted back in early June has gotten tall enough to need mowed.  This forage plant when mowed either by me or by cattle doubles down by growing even more determined to flourish.  It will tiller aggressively and dig down deeper through the hard pan to reach nutrients.  That was among the reasons I planted it: weed suppression, sub-soiling and serious organic matter production.

Here is early June with spotty germination caused by user error:

BMR sorghum x sudangrass

Now here is what it looked like yesterday:

It was about six or seven feet tall.  I needed to cut it to about 12-18″ tall to preserve the growing part of the grass and not kill it, but instead to stimulate it to grow more.  I put a metal blade on a gas powered weed eater and went to work.  Let me tell you it is not very high on my list of fun garden chores.  But here you go:

It looks like a total mess right now.  I do not know if I should remove the stalks to compost in a different place or leave them be to contribute in the spot.  I will keep an eye on the grass to make sure that it does not get smothered.  All in all I am pleased as punch on how it grew.  It went from being seeded early June,  not watered at all except the first week or two to help germination(we are way down in rain here) and was also not fertilized at all and still got nearly 7 feet tall by August 1st.

Depending on where you garden, you may have had rain or not.  In my garden we are still dry and under by inches.  So I irrigate.  Remember gang,  bottom water only, do not spray your plants from above with the hose, you will slowly kill them that way.

Harvest of spring veggies is heavily under way,  hopefully your garden is producing.  If not,  shoot me an email, I will get you rolling on that.

Left: Broccoli side shoots producing after main head,  keep it watered and monitor pests and you will get a secondary harvest

Middle: Cauliflower does OK in my garden but the heat causes some darker color, still tastes OK , but might not be replanted next year

Right: Sugar Snaps are in main harvest time,  the recent storm plus the weight of the peas made it topple over a bit, not a problem

Snow peas

Sugar Snaps were a hybrid off Snow Peas.  I still get the occasional wild-type in the planting which I like.  I use them for salad or slaw.

Integrated Pest Management:

Monitoring you crops lets you get ahead of problems and treat while it is management.  Some times you need to treat, sometimes not.  It is an approach where you mix in many different methods of treatment and control to get a greater success than with single methods.  Using mulch is an important organic process to control and prevent disease.  Using Sevin dust has been my only method of dealing with certain pests like Stink bugs and Cucumber beetles.

Left:  Eggplant with flea beetle damage.  I did not treat early enough.  I cannot treat now due to flowering as that will kill the pollinators.  I am nor worried,  the plants are mature enough to handle the damage

Middle:  Some beetle damage is evident, but again,  the flowers are out so I cannot treat.  Beside, I might hurt that hard working Lady who is helping me out.

Right:  I treated about a week before this pic.  Had some Cucumber Beetle damage to the emergent seedlings, but no flowers were out and to I used Sevin dust.  The new growth reflects the success of treatment. I could still treat at this stage if we get rain, to keep them protected, as I do not have any flowering.

One interesting thing that I have noted over time and now use in my IPM protocol is trap crops.  A trap crop is one that certain pest prefer instead of your veggies and so they eat that and leave more desirable stuff alone.   I do not have Japanese beetles in my veggies,  I do have them in my garden.  They eat the weeds in the Polygonum family.   Some in that family are Pennsylvania Smartweed and Lady’s Thumb.   I do not know why they like it, but they do, and they will absolutely devour it, leaving my stuff alone. Buckwheat is in that family,  it probably tastes good to them.  Here is a pic from my garden,  the beetles have not arrived yet.

Harvest Update:

Left:  Spinach and lettuce harvest is over for me right now,  they are sending up seed heads and taste bitter

Middle:  My onions are heading up nicely.  Keep them watered(not too much) and use as needed until the tops die off

Right: I am not getting heading on my cabbage,  a weather problem.  Bummer.  I do not see a good harvest this year. Hot and dry.

BMR vs the weeds

My cover crops are growing nicely(could use more water).  They are now in an epic Superman v. Batman smackdown with Morning Glory to see who  can emerge victorious.

3.5# of Sugar Snaps

I need to put up some veggies as my fridge is full.  I harvested almost 3 1/2 pounds of Sugar Snaps yesterday morning after a harvest three days prior.  Each veggie has its way to best be stored.  Peas like blanched and frozen.

I will be doing a class on July 12th at 7pm at the Youth Center on Introduction to Harvest and Storage.  Save the Date!!

One of the best ways to improve a patch of ground is by using a cover crop.  Cover cropping is when you plant a certain plant or mix of plants into an area to solve an problem or improve the soil. Things cover crops can do include:

• add biomass
• smother weeds
• drill through hardpan
• increase fertility
• prevent runoff and erosion
• tie nutrients up in the soil

Almost sounds too good to be true, but it is not.  Cover crops have been used for a long time in agriculture and with the increased focus on preventing nutrient loss into our waterways and the resulting problems this has resulted in, you will be hearing more about them in the future.

Currently I am monitoring/helping with three different small scale cover crop experiments.  I do not have 100 acres of corn or soybeans so I am observing them in three different community garden experiments.

Experiment 1: Demonstration garden at the fairgrounds. 

Tomatoes into no-till residue

Rob and Rebecca planted winter rye, crimson clover and vetch into the raised beds last fall and crimped them over in spring, the tomatoes went straight into holes in the residue and are doing great.  This cover crop mix added fertility from the legumes, mulches the soil to prevent disease and water loss, prevented erosion over winter and added biomass from the top growth and root remnants. The tomatoes are doing great.  If you go to the garden, you will see they are outperforming tomatoes planted into straight compost.

Experiment 2: Logan Community Garden

Buckwheat in unused plots

The Logan Community Garden had some space that needed filled that was not going to be used this season and had a fair amount of weeds present.  The cover crop for this area needed to smother weeds, prevent erosion,  keep the soil in use, tie up nutrients and be easy to manage. The crop chosen was Buckwheat, which is elite at all these needs.  The crop is entering flowering right now if you visit the garden and will be a magnet for pollinators, helping the vegetables the gardeners have as well.  It will be mowed to prevent it from setting seed and allowed to decompose in place adding organic matter.

Experiment 3: Wallace Community Garden

BMR sorghum x sudangrass

Sheesh,  what guy planted this? (me).   This spotty planting of BMR(brown mid-rib) Sorghum X Sudangrass is being used as a three year rotation in my garden plot.  My needs are for weed control, increased fertility, increased biomass/organic matter and sub-soil drilling through hardpan.  I have not used this variety before, but have heard many wonderful things about it and its reputation is stellar.  It will get very tall, like corn, and should completely take over this plot by mid summer.  I will mow it to keep it a couple/few feet tall which will signal the roots to double down on root growth.  I will let you all know how this turns out over the season.

Would you like to learn more about cover crops?   I will be talking about cover crops as well as Fertilizers, Organic Matter and Soil Health on Tuesday June 14th at 7pm in a FREE class at the Youth Center,  bring friends and questions and hope to see you there.

As some of you know,  I garden in a community garden here in Columbus, called Wallace Gardens.  Wallace is a Victory Garden remnant from long ago when folks fed their families with what they could grow themselves.  I am happy to have the space as my yard is deep shade under Walnut trees.

Unfortunately, having a garden in one spot with many plot owners and gardeners in various states of interest and plot management has selected our community garden for an amazing array of pest, diseases and weeds that have all naturalized in this spot and will easily out-compete any planted vegetable.  I posted a pic recently of weeds that developed over about a month or so of work related neglect.

 Amazingly enough, this spot is one of the least weedy spot in the garden.  This bed had tomatoes last year under a deep hay mulch for most of the whole season.  The plow however spreads each plot into each other plot so this is what you get.  Mix into this poor fertility, little organic matter and an impermeable hardpan from 70 years of same depth plowing and you have a piece of ground in need of help.

I decided this year to take one-third of my garden space out of production and cover crop it instead.  For those who are unfamiliar with this, a cover crop is a planted crop, could be grass, legume, brassica, etc.  that brings a set of benefits to the ground to keep the ground in use and to improve it depending on what you need improved.

I have hardpan, weeds and low organic matter.  My choice is Brown Mid-Rib Sorghum X Sudan grass

seed about quarter inch round

In the Logan Community Garden, approximately one-third of the ground is open and so the plan is to cover crop with Buckwheat.  This garden has weeds, but is not yet at hardpan and just needs to keep the soil working, weed suppress and add organic matter.  Buckwheat is elite at that.

Next year I will move the cover crops over to the spot with peas and mixed summer veggies and the third year I will cover crop the tomato and spring vegetable section.  This will allow for a three year rotation and add hundreds of pounds of biomatter as well as *hopefully* taking care of some bindweed, morning glory and mint problems I have had the last few years.  I am going to track progress of organic matter addition using some new soil testing methods going on at OARDC and will keep you all in the loop.

Do you want to learn how to incorporate these techniques in your garden?  I will be teaching a FREE class on Fertilizers, Soil Health & Organic Matter and will be talking about cover crops as part of the class.  I hope to see you on Tuesday June 14th at 7pm