The Martyr of the Organic Garden

White and green marbled leaves with yellow, red and orange flowers, the entirely edible plant makes a spicy and attractive addition to a salad, but more importantly, is a great way to control pests! 

Aphids love nasturtiums, and prefer them to other plants.  They feed on leaves and produce a sweet honeydew as a byproduct, which ants then feed on.  Ants actually farm the aphids, and bring them to "greener pastures" if you will, to get a sweeter honeydew.  Nasturiums sweeten the honeydew just right, so the ants bring the aphids off the cucumbers and strawberries, and place them on the nasturiums!  Planting freely throughout the garden ensures that, hopefully, the plants I eat, will be kept free of bugs, and that the bugs will get their fill from the nasturtiums.  In the beginning of the season, the strawberries were covered with the little black bugs, (show now on the underside of the nasturtiums).  However, as soon as I started to plant the nasturtiums, the aphids quickly moved away from the strawberries and onto the nasturtiums.  The strawberries are virtually bug free!  They collect in colonies on the leaves, so I can pick off heavily infested leaves, and eliminate a whole bunch in one fellow swoop.  Organic gardening looks at the garden/farm as a whole ecosystem, of which I am just a part, so I must create an environment where I don't fight with bugs, but encourage them to feed on certain crops....just not the ones I want to eat.

The alligator looking thing is a lady bug larvae.  Waa hoo!  Lady bugs eat aphids and other garden pests.  I hope it's ladies night, every night, at the frosty farm!

Lettuce and lettuce and lettuce!

I forget what kind of lettuce I grew - but it has been growing like a weed! Again, I planted too much, and have been giving it away by the bag full at work.  That's all for lettuce.

Peas and Beans

I decided to try growing some things from seed this year, so bought snap peas and pole beans, as well as various flowers.  I researched the seed companies at the local garden store, to find one NOT owned by Monsanto.  Fortunately, The Chas C. Hart Seed company, to the best of my knowledge is not, and they're local - out of CT!  Above, the pole beans just starting to emerge, and the peas having been transplanted to the ground, with twine around them for extra support - just call it a pea bra.  Then below, the twine goes up what I'm calling the "Bean Tree," my homage to Barbara Kingsolver.  I had been waiting to find something to make the bean support, and one day while walking to subway I saw a fallen branch, perfect!  I cut the branch into pieces, and brought them back via skateboard.  The smaller branches have served as the support for the peas in various places in the garden.

Checking in on the tomatoes

This past weekend I finally planted the tomatoes that have been bouncing from my room, the an outside sheltered area, to the cellar, then back outside, all depending on that day's and night's temperatures.  Now, they are in the ground.  When planting tomatoes, it's a good idea to add some bone meal, which will provide the roots with adequate calcium and phosphorous, both of which are critical for establishing healthy plants.  A continuous source of calcium helps to prevent blossom end rot on tomatoes, and phosphorous is essential for plant cell walls.  Here are the seedlings enjoying some afternoon sun under the frosted glass of my table.

The tomatoes are shown here on my bed, one unseasonably cold May day - this was after 4 had been ripped out of their pots by cats (or angry landlords).  To avoid the wind and the cold, they got to spend a day in bed, next to the sunny window...but not too much sun, so I put a very delicate fabric up, to prevent too much light.  

Tomatoes seedlings are planted all the way up to the first set of leaves, which will later be removed.  The plastic cups go about 2-3 inches down, and prevent cut worm from making a midnight snack of the tomatoes.  Yep, that's a yoga mat.  I look like I am doing yoga the way I have to contort my body around to step in as few places on the soil as possible.  No one likes compacted soil.

I built a mesh fence to go around the raised bed which the cats have seem to taken a liking to for their litter box.  If this doesn't work, I'm buying a coyote.  Craigslist always comes through.

Strawberries

There is nothing so sweet as a fresh picked strawberry, so when I saw those little white flowers start to bloom in mid April, I couldn't wait. I've fertilized with the fish/seaweed fertilizer I've been using about every other week. The strawberries ended up getting so heavy I had to build little stands for the stems to rest on, to keep the berries out of the dirt. You can see it in the fourth picture down, if you aren't too distracted by your pining over the berry itself. I got to taste the first strawberry this morning, May 15th. I haven't decided what's more rewarding, a fresh picked strawberry on a spring morning or a tomato on a hot summer's night. Check back in July.

Cover Crops!

Here's back to the cover crops I got from Johnny's Seeds. I used their spring mix of field peas, oats and hairy vetch. When the peas are inoculated, they affix nitrogen to the soil, which is one of the vital nutrients all plants need to grow. Last Friday night, I manually cut all the crops wit hedge trimmers, trying to minimize damage to the soil as much as possible, though I cut deep enough so that they would not grow back. This year I'm going to try minimal tilling. Soil structure is very important to having healthy soild, and thus growing healthy plants. Heavy and aggressive tilling destroys the organisms(worms, bacteria, fungus etc) that live in the soil and help it stay healthy. Look at that lettuce!

Twelve Tomatoes Take a Trip

Like father, like son, my dad and I were both bitten by the vegetable gardening bug last year, and are at it again this year. It seems only appropriate, then, for my father to hand deliver the heirloom tomato seedlings he has been growing from seed. He brought down 12 total, 10 'Cherokee Purples', and 2 'Purple Passions'. I took them, in a tightly packed box on metro north, and then through the streets of Harlem, then to the M60 bus, and finally home in Astoria. Surprisingly, no catastrophes, just curious folks on Metro North and Harlem. Below are pictures of me holding the tomatoes, the seedlings on the bus with the Manhattan skyline in the background, and finally arriving in Astoria.

Waking up in 2010

Here is the garden in mid-March, just as it was starting to wake up! In this picture, I had just planted my cover crop of hairy vetch, field peas and rye. Cover crops are a great way to improve soil quality, and add organic material to your soil. I’ll let the cover crops grow for about two months, then til gently back into the soil.