Martha's Blight

The tomato blight got Martha, too, and its not pretty.  In fact, I can say this bit of news actually makes me feel quite better.  If the grande dame of all things domestique caught the fungus, then it can’t be all my fault that the tomatoes at the community garden have taken a turn for the worse. Yes my tomato plants may be naked from the waist down, but the fruit, if not plentiful as they should be, are still going fairly strong. And no blight in my backyard container tomatoes yet!

(via Slashfood)

I harvested these green beans from my community garden plot last week.  This is about half the amount I would eat in a typical sitting.  Sadly, this is all my bean contenders will produce this year as their leaves have yellowed and wilted.  Even if the plants weren’t so sickly, I don’t think I ever had enough space to plant the number of plants required to provide for my green bean needs.  Sadly, this is one vegetable I think I’m going to have to stick to the farmers market for. Le sigh.

Huge news for the community gardeners out there! Rep. Insless (WA-1) introduced a bill this week that would provide grants for local community gardens.  The bill does not specify how much would be available, but does say that the the grants could be used for the following:

• (1) Acquiring any interest in real property.

• (2) Construction.

• (3) Community outreach.

• (4) Operations.

• (5) Any other appropriate activity.

The grants can be used for up to 80% of the overall costs attributed to the garden.  The other 20% must be cash or in-kind contributions. Usually work donated can be counted as in-kind contributions, which could probably easily be covered by the sweat equity the garden members donate.

H/T Jill.

One of the cool things about vegetable gardening is I’ve learned how to recognize many plants by their leaves.  I’ve never been much of a botanist, but it’s kinda cool to walk past plant and know what I can pluck it and take a bite out of it.  Hint: never make a salad out of tomato leaves, as they look very similar to other, poisonous members of the Nightshade family, such as Belladonna.  In fact, Americans believed that tomatoes were poisonous until 1820.

Knowing your leaves is not just important for not accidentally poisoning yourself.  It can also be very important to avoiding a crucial misstep on the campaign trail.  Don’t make Obama’s mistake, be sure to avoid the dreaded arugula when running for office.

Wild Arugula

Since one never knows when you may find yourself running for prez, it’s always a good idea to brush up on your leafy greens. Earthbound Greens has put together a nifty salad greens chart for all your leaf identification needs.

(H/T Herbiv.org)

The First Lady invited the Bancroft schoolkids down to the farm to pluck some goodies.  The kids pulled up a feast including:

• 73 pounds of lettuce
• 12 pounds of peas
  
• 1 cucumber

They also served some baked, not fried chicken.  Sadly, we district folks aren’t allowed to raise our own chickens so there was no poultry assassinations to behold.  The White House claims to have harvested over 225 lbs of food so far from the garden.  I admit it, I am so jealous.  My little community garden plot just can’t compete.

We had a really horrible event happen at the Bancroft Community Garden this week.  My garden bed neighbor has an amazing jungle of vegetables that puts the rest of us to shame.  Her bed is overflowing with tomatoes and basil and peas, and up until yesterday, hot peppers.  In fact the peppers were just on the verge of being ripe and ready for harvest.  Yet, when she visited the garden this morning they were gone. Not gone in a the-rats-got-them kinda way either.  These peppers were perfectly clipped an cultivated by who she calls the “Midnight Gardner”.

This is my first experience witnessing garden theft.  So being the good internet geek that I am, I went a-googling.  And I found out that community garden drama is not a rare thing:

This weekend I visited the garden because I had been told new plots were being marked and dug for new garden members. I had not been there since last weekend. When I walked over to admire my own plot I immediately noticed the sun glinting off hundreds of pieces of broken glass all over the surface of the ground. Then I noticed lumps of red clay, and deep impressions everywhere that looked like shovel holes. I walked around and around my plot, not understanding what I was seeing, and frankly not believing my eyes.

Then I walked over to the area where new plots had been broken. I noticed one rectangular area where the soil had barely been broken, and next to it another similar rectangular area where the soil had been finely worked. Very finely worked. So finely worked that it had the appearance of potting soil. Not a shard of glass in sight, not a clod of clay in sight.

I then looked at a series of raised beds, plastic forms where the garden manager raises vegetables as a youth project. During the summer and fall and all winter long these plastic raised bed forms had been full of clay soil, loaded with glass and weeds, which I knew because I had tried to help weed them from time to time. On this day I reached down into one of them and my hand sunk into soil fine and black and clean. My soil, in fact. I recognized it as soon as I touched it.

I walked back over to my own plot and could see what had happened. My soil had been removed from my plot. The soil from the new bed and the raised forms had been removed from those places and carried over to my bed. The soils were switched.

THEY STOLE HER DIRT.  Who does that? So stay strong, garden neighbor, at least you still have your soil.

Milepost 5 Community Garden

I love Portland, the coffee, the music, the sustainability.  I could write poems about the amazing utopia that is that city.  And now I have one more reason to be in awe. The Milepost 5 apartment complex has a new selling point: their own community garden.

They boast:

The community garden began taking shape April, ‘09. Dan Blavin of POP Farming is managing our community garden-micro-farm. Four beds will be built at the beginning of this year’s growing season. Milepost 5 is also installing a worm composter, the Worm Wigwam, to help produce fertilized dirt. Initial plantings cover about 1200 square feet with plenty of room to expand. Plantings include arugula, garlic, kale, lettuces, onions, and more.

The garden is 100% organic.

Forget the granite countertops and heated pools - next time you’re apartment hunting, ask them how many garden beds they have.

Seventh Street Community Garden was one of the most productive and effective community garden in DC.  The garden incorporated training programs to teach the neighbors how to grow their own food. So it was a great loss when their landlords told them time was up and that they were finally ready to build on the parcel of land they had been lending to the locel gardeners.

Happily, the Seventh Street Community Garden found a new home, and now has a new name - Common Good City Farm.  The new digs really is a farm with almost half an acre which sits on the the baseball field of one of number of schools that have been closed in the city.

The farm runs several training and education programs, but the coolest by far is the Green Tomorrows program. In exchange for just 2 hours of work per week, low income individuals get a bag of fresh fruit and vegetables, not to mention a great farming education.  Sustainability at work.

Check out The Nightly News with Brian Williams visiting Common Good City Farm.

Turns out there are some new kids on the block, and I like their style.  Luke and Doug are The New Urban Sharecroppers.  Two midwesterner lads who have begun to take over neighbor’s yards to do some farming of their own. They are definitely not the first to come up with the idea of yard sharing for gardening, but they may be the new game in the district.

Luke, Doug, I feel your pain on the tomato front - I’ve been having the exact same problem with the yellowing of the leaves.  I thought it might be that I put them out too early also, but another one of my fellow community gardners suggested I may not have enough nitrogen in my soil.  The soil was way too heavy on the leaf mulch, so I mixed in 2 bags of composted manure and a small bag of dried blood. Yes, that’s right, dried blood, and it smells horrific, but has a heavy amount of nitrogen.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed that that worked.

You’ll have to stop by the Bancroft Community Garden someime and say hi and talk plants.

In what may be one of my favorite headlines yet, the AP in Ohio gives us a brief on a very fun program in a northern Ohio county jail, called, Doing Thyme:

Sandusky County Sheriff Kyle Overmyer got the idea for a vegetable garden at the jail in Fremont after he was forced to reduce his budget by $75,000 this spring.

Everyone is looking to gardening to save on food costs.  Even Ohio jails. Of course, the Canadians are way ahead of us. And San Quentin had one in 2006. Of course, San Quentin may not be around for much longer.

Maggie Knowles in Chatsworth, CA is starting a community garden in her neighborhood.  The announcement states:

We welcome your participation to help contribute to the design, development, and maintenance of the garden.

We will design the garden club organization – number of officers, their titles and responsibilities.

Garden Club Organization? I still haven’t put together the googlegroup for our community garden, and I know I will burn in hell for it.  I kid, Maggie.  God bless yah for being way more organized than me.

Schematic with dates planted of my community garden plot so far.

Community Garden Plot as of 5.16.09

About 2 months ago I got really lucky and stumbled across a great little community garden about 4 blocks from my house. The garden got started in July of last year with 6 garden beds.This year there has been a huge surge in interest, requiring some carpentry to meet demand.

Turns out that raised garden beds are kinda a necessity in urban areas (and probably all of New Jersey). Your produce is only as good as your soil, and when your soil can have anything from lead paint to arsenic to asbestos to old heating oil drums you probably don’t want to be eating anything that grew out of it. I’m not just being prissy here. When you think about it, everything a plant is is built out of the air, water, and soil you give it. (more…)

But when are they getting the puppy?

The oddities of severe economic strife crop up in odd ways. The Burlington Free Press reports this week on the growing wave of community garden theft:

Community gardeners have always known that theft is a reality, Flint said. Their plots are generally open to the public and it