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Gardening 
Sun Mar 14, 2010 at 16:29:08 PM PDT
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I'm now the proud mother of 4 baby fig trees! Back in January, I attended a fruit tree propagation workshop, which I wrote about on this blog. I came home from the workshop with 6 fig tree cuttings, 4 blackberry cuttings, 2 pomegranate cuttings, and 2 dragon fruit cuttings. The goal was to wait for each of them to take root. And, so far, 4 of the figs have done so:
Fig tree cutting with roots and some vermiculite sticking to it
It took about 6 weeks to two months for it to happen, but it did. And it didn't happen like I thought it would. As you can see here, the roots grew out of the side of the cutting. I had assumed they would grow out the bottom. A few weeks ago, I found my first evidence of success. This cutting had a few roots growing from it. I tried to transplant it by sticking it into a pot of soil and I knocked the roots right off. Oops. I felt rather ashamed and disappointed, and I put the cutting back in the vermiculite, hoping it would grow some more roots.
Then about a week ago, three of the others grew roots. This time I transplanted them MUCH more carefully, gently holding them inside a mostly empty pot and adding soil around them so I wouldn't damage the roots. I moved them outdoors to a spot with very little sun. I did this for about an hour the first day, and then I brought them back in overnight before moving them back outside for good. Today I moved those three to a slightly sunnier spot. Then I checked this cutting to see if it had recovered, and it had - quite well actually! So I transplanted it as well (very gently this time!) and moved it outdoors to the same shady spot where I started the others. Cross your fingers and hope I don't kill my new baby trees!
As for the other plants, one of the dragonfruits was damaged by heavy rainfall, and one (perhaps two) of the blackberries became a cat toy. The others are just hanging out in moist vermiculate and hopefully growing some roots.
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Sun Mar 14, 2010 at 15:09:57 PM PDT
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We've got our first real harvest this week! Behold, carrots and spring garlic:
I also plan to pick a bunch of stinging nettles, to round out tonight's celebratory meal. And there will be much more to come in the next few days. Tuesday, I noticed our very first baby sugarsnap pea:
We've now got several peas this size, but none are ready to eat yet. Still, they are getting close and I'm getting excited!
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Thu Mar 04, 2010 at 02:30:28 AM PST
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Today I was out in the garden when I noticed a new bug. It was a small fly that almost looked like a large ant with wings. About two seconds of internet research revealed that it was an carrot rust fly. Dammit.
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Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 23:31:57 PM PST
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I'd like to share with you our little garden's progress. I've been creating slide shows showing each plant's growth, mostly for my own reference. It's fascinating watching each plant develop, but when looking at a tiny little plant, it's impossible not to wonder how and when it is going to get big enough to eat. See a few of my slide shows below. They are not finished yet (as the plants are not mature yet) so this is just a preview of more to come.
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Sun Feb 21, 2010 at 18:00:00 PM PST
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It's strawberry planting time around here, and I just got my strawberries planted. To give them a nice, sunny location, we removed a four foot by six foot part of our patio. (When I say "we," I really mean "my boyfriend.") Then we dug up a foot of soil, loosened up the soil below it, and filled our 1-foot-deep hole back in with soil, mixing in a one inch thick layer of compost and some coffee grounds as we went. We had our soil tested recently and we've got enough organic matter in the soil (5%), a good pH (6.7), and high levels of phosphorus and potassium. Where we lack is nitrogen and - although the test didn't say it - soil life. You can dig and dig and hardly find any worms - and no bugs at all! I've got no idea what we've got in the way of microbes but I doubt it's optimal. The compost we added (made from chicken poop and wood chips) will give the soil some biodiversity, as well as some nitrogen. The coffee grounds increase the acidity (6.7 is slightly acidic and great for most plants, but strawberries like a pH of 6 or even lower).
Then - we planted our strawberries! We have 12 plants of 2 varieties of strawberries that grow well around here - Chandler and Sequoia. I want to try companion planting, so I left room in the middle for a borage plant (a circle with a 15" diameter) and then put a line of poles for green beans down the middle. (I'm going to remove them because, as it turns out, strawberries should be companion planted with bush beans not pole beans - oops!) Then I planted 3 strawberry plants in each quadrant of the bed, giving each strawberry a 6" of space on all sides (i.e. the strawberries are 12" from one another). Last, I added spinach in between the two groups of three strawberries on one side and lettuce on the other.
I can fit some more lettuce in the corners, but I will plant it later. Leaf lettuce matures in 6-10 weeks and has a short harvest period. Spinach has a longer harvest period. Therefore, I don't want to plant all of my lettuce at once so I can have a continual supply to eat in salads as it grows.
Here's the result:
The spinach side:
The lettuce side:
More on companion planting and plant spacing below.
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Mon Feb 15, 2010 at 21:24:38 PM PST
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I wish I could tell you that schadenfreude tasted sweet, but to be honest, it was garlicky. And quite nutritious.
Hahahaha! The ultimate revenge! I will eat you!
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Mon Feb 15, 2010 at 14:27:50 PM PST
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A month or so ago, I attended a fruit tree propagation workshop. Fruit tree propagation seems to be both easy and tricky at the same time. It's incredibly simple to cut off a branch of an existing tree, plop it in a pot of vermiculite, water it, and wait for it to take root. And it's tricky because the tree won't always take root. There are a few things you can do to improve your chances of success, but mostly you just have to wait and hope.
After many weeks of telling my cuttings to "grow vigorously" a few of them did:
The growth of leaves is not an indicator of success, but one of my pomegranate and one of my blackberry cuttings look like they have new branches growing! Hooray! I asked my friend Ian (my go-to fruit tree expert and the instructor of the fruit tree propagation workshop) what to do next. If they took root, he said, I can re-pot them and then start to ease them into moving outside. Don't put them in the sun just yet. Put them in the shade.
I lovingly got a pot ready to go with lots of worm poop and bat poop and all other things plants like. Then I pulled up my pomegranate cutting, hoping to see roots. And... nothing. Same with the blackberry. Nothing. So I put them back into the vermiculite. I'll just have to keep waiting and hoping.
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Fri Feb 12, 2010 at 12:20:13 PM PST
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After months and months of attempting to grow my own food, I have a new development to announce from Flower Power Farm (my family's name for our garden): WE HAVE FLOWERS!!!!
Fava beans take 80-100 days to grow to maturity, so I'm told. We planted ours on November 11. It's been 94 days. And until about yesterday, the plants showed NO SIGN of doing anything that would result in fava beans. Fortunately, these plants are doing a double duty as wonderful cover crops, so even if they end in failure as far as fava beans go, they are still helping the soil - and the plants will be very welcome additions to our compost pile.
Then, yesterday I decided to take a look at our usually very boring fava beans. And here's what I saw:
For anyone who is keeping track, that is our FIRST FLOWER on any of our very many plants here in the entire garden. Hooray!
More updates below...
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Wed Feb 10, 2010 at 13:28:51 PM PST
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To coordinate the large number of plants I've got growing, and to figure out what I'll be harvesting when, I've created a large spreadsheet. I've listed every single plant that I am currently growing or intend to grow, organized by family. Then I've listed how long each plant takes to sprout and to grow to maturity, as well as how many weeks of harvest to expect. Here's a picture:
Key: P = Plant, S = Sprout, T = Transplant, H = Harvest
Well, I've got quite a bit of broccoli growing at present. And according to the spreadsheet, it should be pretty darn close to harvest. Twelve more days or so, and I should have some ready to eat broccoli. Only, the broccoli does not seem to think so. Here is a picture of the broccoli:
I commented to my boyfriend that the broccoli should be ready in about 2 weeks.
He said, "That broccoli does not look like it will be ready in 2 weeks."
Me: "Well, the spreadsheet says it should be ready in 2 weeks."
BF: "Has the broccoli seen the spreadsheet?"
Me: "No, but I have a laptop. I will go out to the garden and show the broccoli the spreadsheet and then explain that it must grow faster."
Gah! Why does the gardening book tell me that broccoli only requires 8-9 weeks to grow to maturity???
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Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 23:08:07 PM PST
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This week, I had an inspiration. I spoke to Stacey of BK Farmyards in Brooklyn, NY. They run a CSA program out of people's backyards in New York City. What a great idea! If she can do it, why not me? So I sent out an email asking for a guinea pig. Who would offer up their yard for me to farm it? The homeowner would pay a price like a real CSA, except it would be less expensive because they were donating the land. A woman responded and I met with her Wednesday. Then a few friends responded that they had a similar idea to start a CSA program out of backyards, and perhaps we could work together. Awesome! Maybe I can turn Flower Power Farm into a reality! So here's what happened...
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Mon Jan 25, 2010 at 18:13:50 PM PST
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Most of our yard is enclosed in a fence and - thus far - that's where we've done our gardening. But there's a small patch of the yard outside the fence (on the other side of the driveway) and I've been dreaming of planting something there for a while. It's extra space to plant food, of course, but it can also become an advertisement for gardening and a way to build a community. I've heard this as feedback from a few other front yard gardeners before. Plant a garden in your front yard and watch your neighbors - even your mailman and passers by - take notice and even take an interest.
If you haven't been following along, "Flower Power Farm" is the name the kids and I picked for our garden (we're just pretending it's a real farm). Here's what happened as we started to turn our unfenced front yard into a "Salad Bar."
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Thu Jan 21, 2010 at 14:55:41 PM PST
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Last week, my boyfriend told me it was going to rain all this week. We would have a torrential downpour. I decided to put off any more work in the garden (aside from weeding) until after the rain. Besides, I was going to Phoenix from Sunday until Wednesday. With luck the rain would be done before I got home. Then I could get back into the garden. And boy was I excited to do so! I've got all kinds of seeds ready to plant - sunflowers, marigolds, several types of lettuce, spinach, chard, arugula (for my boyfriend - I HATE arugula!!!!!), and more. Plus I've got my new dragonfruit cacti AND now that I've been gardening for a month I'm starting to uncover what I've done wrong and I'd like to right it.
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Sat Jan 16, 2010 at 16:45:05 PM PST
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Today I attended a Fruit Tree Propagation Workshop. Being a total newbie to growing anything (other than mold in my refrigerator), it was really a new idea for me. I had kind of a kindergarten grasp of how you grow plants. You know, the plant makes a seed, and then you plant the seed and a new plant grows. I knew, of course, that for some fruits like apples, grafting is the way to go because if you grow apples from seed they probably won't taste that good. But I don't know how to graft fruit trees. I just assumed I'd have to buy an apple tree from a nursery if I wanted to grow apples.
Well, we didn't do anything with apples at the workshop today, but we did work with pomegranates, figs, prickly pears, dragonfruit, several kinds of citrus, peaches, plums, and blackberries. Here's a taste of what I learned.
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Wed Jan 13, 2010 at 16:53:56 PM PST
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This week at Flower Power "Farm" (our garden), we planted scallions and garlic... and we saw our first nasturtiums and broccoli sprout. Or at least, I think that's what they are. I am not entirely sure. Certainly some of the veteran gardeners on this site can let me know. We also started a few new charts to graph the growth of our sugarsnap peas. One is a little more complex (which our older daughter will understand). The other is more simple so our little one can understand it.
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Tue Jan 12, 2010 at 02:19:46 AM PST
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( - promoted by Jill Richardson)
Is it possible to write a hatchet job about something as innocent as school gardens?
Apparently so. I would not have believed it, but there it is in the otherwise esteemed Atlantic magazine, a venomous screed that would have you believe that gardening constitutes some sinister scheme to take over our nation's schools; that schools are turning kids into farm workers; that the educational establishment is throwing math and reading to the dogs in favor of growing arugula.
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