The year in gardening 2009/Resolutions for 2010

My plot back in early September

The past year may go down in history as one of the worst years in gardening, at least in the past decade. Above-average rainfall and below-average temperatures during the crucial months of the growing season resulted in a below-average yield, especially with tomatoes. In November, I abandoned my experiment of determining how much I benefited monetarily from planting and harvesting edibles, reporting a negative balance. And on some days, I spent more time clearing out infected fruits and vegetables than harvesting healthy ones.

The Minton Stable Garden in bloom, August

However, I still find gardening to be a satisfying act, providing physical and emotional benefits to those who participate in it. Another year at the Minton Stable Community Garden led to more friendships with gardeners and other Steering Committee members. A community of bloggers provided advice and ideas for improving my garden practices as well. And the rain had some advantages, including a lower water bill for the community garden (only $141.82, down from last year's $203.40). As long as I have my 140 square feet in JP and land at home, and Massachusetts hasn't yet disappeared under rising sea levels, I'll continue gardening. Here is my second annual set of lists, with items not in any particular order.

Top 5 successful plants:
1. Kentucky Wonder pole beans
2. Fiesta organic broccoli
3. Forellenschluss Romaine lettuce (grown in Minton Stable Garden)
4. June-bearing strawberries (before the botrytis set in)
5. Volunteer raspberries--they liked the fall conditions

Top 5 failures:
1. All tomato varieties (except volunteer cherry tomatoes)--due to below-average temps and late blight
2. Anything I tried to grow in my backyard--too shady
3. Spinach after the invasion of leaf miners
4. Irises I tried to transplant to a sunnier location in front yard--maybe they'll bloom next year
5. Zinnias--planted late and not given enough room

Resolutions for 2010:
1. Continue growing the same volume of tomatoes, trying some different varieties, but make a point of pruning them to strengthen plants and ensure that they get more light.
2. Grow more varieties of broccoli, like Piricicaba and broccoli raab, and other plants, including kale and other greens, coriander, parsley, and other herbs, carrots, and cauliflower.
3. Reduce the size of the strawberry bed to make room for the raspberries.
4. Keep trying to achieve that fall crop of greens, perhaps by planting better varieties sooner, starting some indoors in August so they can grow out back under row covers, or by some other means.
5. Be more aggressive in thinning out perennials, to avoid diseases like powdery mildew or to keep them from taking over my MSG plot. Black-eyed susans, anyone?
6. Take better photos, including sharper close-ups and documentation of the garden over time.

Happy New Year! I'd be curious to read the resolutions of other gardeners.

The silver lining

Rain again. This has been the weather word, the takeaway from this growing season. A few years from now we'll be saying to each other, "Remember that awful summer of 2009?" Hopefully, we won't be saying, "Remember when it all started to go downhill?"

The awful effects of the rainy, cold summer, which seems to have transitioned to a rainy fall, have been numerous. Below-average harvests. Late blight, botrytis, powdery mildew, and other infestations. Plants failing to thrive. A breeding climate for mosquitoes. Lingering seasonal affective disorder. Ruined plans, and the list goes on. As a heavy downpour kept me indoors on Tuesday morning, I decided I had enough doom and gloom, so I considered the positive and started this list, easier now that most of my problems have been cleared away. And today I took some pretty photos of rain on some of my plants outside. I know many of you out there may find this a cruel joke, but there are reasons to like the rain:

1. The rain extended my lettuce harvest. What has been in past seasons a 2-week spell of round-the-clock salads and giveaways lasted about twice as long. I was able to keep some of it in the ground and harvest it as needed, and when it was all over, only a few heads had bolted.
2. Fewer weeds. No invasions of pigweed to slave away over. Not that the gardens were invasive-free--they just didn't take over as much.
3. I wasn't inundated with too many tomatoes that I had to foist upon my friends and family, who would in turn foist theirs upon me.
4. Less sun meant that a slowdown of my skin's aging process. Also money saved on sunscreen and beach parking.
5. With few weeds to pull and vegetables to haul, I had fewer back problems, thus spending less on ibuprofen and reducing my risk of needing physical therapy.
6. How could I almost forget this one? Lower water bills! Not to mention fewer times driving over to the Minton Stable Garden to water, so I reduced my carbon footprint.
7. A chance to see if the waterproof camping equipment lived up to its promise. For the most part, it did.Feel free to add to this list or throw a few blighted tomatoes at me for even suggesting it.

See how they've grown

My visit Wednesday to the Minton Stable Garden in the rain turned out to bring more relief than I had expected. We have had another week of weather that varied only in the intensity of the precipitation--rain falling in gentle drops, as a fine mist that rendered umbrellas useless, and steady waves of thunderstorms that seemed like they would never end. If the conditions left humans irritable and depressed, how were the plants responding?I had thought I'd seen the end of the strawberries, but still came away with a handful that were in their prime; a few were even the 2008 size. My tomatoes had also shown signs of growth and my pole beans (above), which I thought I had planted a bit late, were about 6 inches high and undisturbed. Also, my echinacea had begun to bloom.
Of course, I didn't need to be concerned for the plants known to endure day upon day of temperatures that often don't make it past 70 degrees F. As you can see in the photo of the vegetable end of my plot, the remaining heads of lettuce had not bolted, and the broccoli had grown a great deal. Despite the tangled mess my snap peas are in, I still harvested about a half pound.A few days ago at the Harvest Coop I noticed that snap peas were priced at $4.59 a pound (which seemed kind of high, so I wondered if the weather was negatively impacting the overall harvest). In total, from my yard and MSG plot, I have picked about one pound total, so now I'll calculate the value of my harvest for the past week:

Previous benefits total: $75.50
1 pound of snap peas at $4.59/lb.: $4.59
1/2 pint of strawberries at $3.99/pt.: $2.00
2 heads of Romaine lettuce at $2.49/each: $4.98

New benefits total: $87.07

Total costs so far: $167.07

Current balance: $-80.00

The garden has grown so much that it's difficult to see across to the plots on the opposite end. Compare this shot with the beginning of the season in late March, and even these photos from early May.And to end, here's my latest garden envy photo: someone already has raspberries!

Not what I ordered

Once in a while, you don't get what you asked for. Like all these extra rainy days. "That's not what I ordered," you say. "I think that was for the other table over there, the one with the drought."The strawberries have definitely had their fill of precipitation as well as temperatures around 60 degrees F. The number of soft and rotted fruits have caught up with the number of healthy ones. As you can see in this photo, taken about a week ago, many of the berries in the shovel appear to have some sort of blight, possibly botrytis, a fungus disease that favors the current weather conditions. I've been doing my best to stay on top of this problem and dispose of the diseased berries, though I'm overdue for a visit to my plot.

Another less serious but notable item that I had not ordered was what appears to be snow peas in my sugar snap pea crop. Another MSG member had mentioned the same situation in her plot. I don't think it's fair to implicate Fedco, since I experienced the same phenomenon with a different brand of snap pea seeds last year. It's not such a big deal anyway, since only a few plants out of the whole crop produce the different variety, and the pods are healthy and fine. But it's a little unnerving to leave a pod on the vine with the expectation that it will puff out into a sugar snap, only to have it become overripe.
What causes this variation? I'm no geneticist, but I wonder if it has anything to do with what I read in this source: "The modern sugar snap pea is the progeny of a cross between a snow pea and an ususual pea that was tightly podded with thick walls." Some kind of cross-pollination issue, perhaps. I'll try to remember to post a photo of some plants in my garden, if it ever stops raining. I've only harvested a few, so far, so I'll keep them out of my latest benefits of gardening statistics.

Previous total (benefits): $29.13
5 heads Romaine at $2.49 each: $12.45
8 1/2 pints strawberries at $3.99 each: $33.92

New benefits total: $75.50

Total costs so far: $167.07

Current balance: $-91.57

I think we're near the end of the strawberries, however. I wondering if I'll be able to fill a pint container with healthy fruit when I visit the plot tomorrow.

The benefits of gardening and other updates

Some of you may recall that I started my 2009 gardening season with an experiment recording my gardening expenses and comparing them to the estimated costs of the vegetables and fruits that my gardens would yield. My not-so-scientific process began with a general question: Does gardening save money on food costs, and if so, by how much? However, I plowed right into my research with no hypothesis, and three months into the procedure, I am still on the fence, partly due to the amount I have spent so far on a new grow light, salt hay, plot dues, and other expenses.

Since then, a few weeks have passed without a cent going directly into my gardening costs. But now, I can begin estimating my yield. In recent posts I've reported that my family and I have already started enjoying some of the lettuce and spinach. What we began eating every few days has now become what rice is to many other cultures. Now salads must be consumed every day, and no sandwich is permitted to be made without a layer of green. Anyone who walks in the door of our home will not be allowed out without a recycled takeout container of the most recent harvest.

But before I continue on this subject, I'd like to ask: What has happened to some of my spinach? I returned to the Minton Stable Garden yesterday after a few days away to find an ugly blight. Some of the leaves appeared bleached out, while others displayed what looked like bird droppings. I doubt that a flock of birds would hover over a row of spinach and leave the rest of the garden untouched. My husband's theory based on his past experience (although he's away for work and unable to see the problem, let alone meet his salad quota) is that it may be a fungus. From a search through my books and the Internet I learned that too much moisture lingering on spinach leaves can lead to diseases such as Anthracnose (which comes closest to resembling what mine have) and the more threatening-looking blue mold. The rainy, chilly weather of the past few days may be to blame. I bagged up the affected leaves and discarded them. End of story, I hope.

Now, back to the healthy greens harvested--how much are they worth? Since I've been picking leaves and not whole heads or bunches, I'll base my estimation on my experience buying a similar organic product. At this point my daughter and I have picked the equivalent of one container of Olivia's Organics salad mix, perhaps a combination of their Romaine and Spinach products, or another mix. I believe that the last time I saw it at the Harvest Coop in JP it was priced at $3.59 a container, so I'll make the not-so-scientific assumption that I have saved that much in my food budget. So my total monetary benefit of my vegetable and fruit gardening is so far:

1 container* of salad greens $3.59**

*According to the web site, the size is 6/5 ounces.
**In Massachusetts, food from the grocery is not taxed.

I have never been good at making quick decisions, but I had promised myself that by the end of the post I would be able to jump off the fence in one direction or the other. Will the value of my harvest exceed my expenses? My guess is now...maybe next year.

As I finish this up it has begun to rain again in Boston. You might find me in the MSG tomorrow wiping off my spinach. In the meantime, I'll leave you with an image of what's coming into bloom: lupines and poppies from another gardener's plot.

Is it my imagination?

It was 7:00 am on the Cape as I started drafting today's post, and a steady rain was falling.  Again.  Usually a welcome sight to most gardeners.  But we've been deluged quite a bit this summer, and mushrooms are becoming a regular occurrence in my backyard.  Plus there's the speculation that too much water on my peppers and tomatoes is causing blossom end rot and root rot (see previous post).  Despite the convenience of being spared a trip over to the plot when other demands dictate, the question is, how much is too much?

That question piqued my interest in the effects of global warming on gardens.  In her Sustainable Gardening Blog last year, Susan Harris provided a formidable list that included increased rainfall and pollen production, as well as an increase in weedy and noxious plants (such as poison ivy), heat stress to tomatoes and other warm-season crops, and difficulties of growing lilacs, rhododendrons, and some trees.

The National Arbor Day Foundation's web site features an animation showing the boundaries of the hardiness zones moving northward between 1990 and 2006, due to the increase in temperatures.  These little changes we've been noticing over the years, whether it's more rain or diminished success growing a once-reliable staple, may be linked to something larger and more disturbing.