TBT: watching the garden grow

Throwback Thursday!  It's hard to believe the garden ever looked neat and organized.  Scroll through the pictures to see what I mean.  Let's take a look back to April, when outdoor planting began:

Colt poses in front of the newly created garden

Front rows: spinach, back row: sugar snap peas

Artsy angle

Cabbage on the right, tomato seedlings in the back left, Brussels sprouts back right

Cucumbers...these did not turn out well, probably because the tomatoes completely blocked their sun after a few weeks

Growing!  Flowering plants are summer squash.  Those grew like weeds.

Cabbage starting to look cabbag-y

View from above

Woah!  I let it go too long between pictures here...About now we're realizing why cabbage said 3 ft between plants. 

Ok, what is happening here.  There was at least a two month window between this picture and the previous one.  Most of the cabbages have been harvested and we planted jalepeños and bell peppers in their place.  Eggplants went in next to the Brussels sprouts, the snap peas have died but string beans have taken their place, and the summer squash is making a play for the patio.

You can actually see some cherry tomatoes from this picture!  It is also starting to look like a jungle.

We just took out the summer squash last week and tried to trim back the tomatoes and peppers.  

Tune in next week for some plant-level detail!

Let's talk about Brussels sprouts

One of the vegetables I was most looking forward to growing and eating was Brussels sprouts.  Growing up we never ate them, probably because our mom assumed we would fall under the tired "kids don't like Brussels sprouts" trope, or maybe she didn't like them herself.  Either way, I never remember eating them until I was grown, and got them as part of a CSA a few years back in Pittsburgh.  The CSA helpfully sent out recipes each week, and for Brussels sprouts the recipe basically went like this - slather in olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt and fresh ground pepper, add a spritz of lemon juice (optional), and roast at 400 F.  You really can't go wrong with roasted vegetables, and I was hooked.

Fast forward to January of this year, and Roger and I decided to dedicate a solid 16 sq ft of garden space to Brussels sprouts.  We diligently planted the seeds indoors on January 25, according to the plan, and moved them outside in April.  

Top right 4x4 squares are Brussels sprouts

Transplanting

After another two months, those little seedlings started to look like this:

 Things were moving along swimmingly, or so I thought.  We started to notice some pest damage on the leaves, and closer inspection gave way to a frightening discovery:

Eggs!!!!

 

Pest damage (can you find the pest?)

Some type of caterpillar thing, I think in the process of laying an egg.

We've tried a few things to get rid of the pests and keep them from returning:

• Soapy water
• Concoction of coffee grounds, garlic, onions, and cayenne pepper powder, marinated overnight
• Trying to avoid standing water on the leaves, so only watering at the base of the plants

All of these have had some success, but problems remain.  I haven't seen the caterpillars in a while, but now there are some tiny white bugs that live on the plants.  The standing water was less of a problem when summer was in full swing, but now that September is here it might return.  Compounding the problem is the sprouts are planted in the most shady area of the garden, limiting their growing potential and keeping things damp.

According to our research, the Brussels sprouts should have been ready for harvest June 4.  It is now over two months later, and we are not that much closer. 

This little guy has the most shady spot in the garden.  I don't have much hope that the sprouts will fully form before winter.

These are some of the most mature sprouts, but still not full-sized.  I hope to get at least three full stalks before the first frost.

The whole Brussels sprouts patch is kind of a mess.  

The sprouts started falling over on each other once they got tall enough.  A few have died.  Three or four look like they might produce a full stalk of sprouts before the season is over.  Maybe we planted these too close together, and definitely not in full enough sunlight.  I'll make another Brussels sprouts update later in the season.  Lots of lessons learned for next year!

Fast forward: first harvest and first infestation

Spinach came in fast and furious starting in April.  It's in the rows on the left side.

This was one of the easiest plants to grow.  Clipping leaves from one or two squares per day provided our salad for weeks.  

This bountiful harvest began just as days began getting warm, and occasionally hot.  One day, Roger mentioned he thought the sun was "burning" the leaves.  That's strange.  It definitely looked like something was amiss.

Credit: Shoura Group (did not remember to take pictures of the infected spinach)

Turns out, this is actually a type of fungal infestation.  Unfortunately it spreads easily when spores travel through the air due to rain or watering.  So, we decided to pick all the undamaged leaves and then remove the rest of the crop.  Next year we will look for spinach seeds that are resistant to the fungus.  Also keeping the leaves dry helps avoid the problem, so things like wider spacing between plants and planting in full sun help on that front.

The Plan

It's been a while since our last post, but that doesn't mean we haven't been gardening.  As the title of the blog suggests, our back yard is roughly the size of a postage stamp.  However, we've decided to allocate roughly 50% of the square footage of the backyard to vegetables, plus some large pots here and there.  This actually turns out to be a pretty substantial area when it is all built and filled in with dirt.

Roger filling the raised vegetable bed with dirt.

Roger took a super organized approach to planning our garden.  I would like to say we both did, but to be honest I am just along for the ride (and the vegetables).  First we needed to decide what to plant.  Our decision variables were:  how much we personally liked a particular vegetable, expected yield per square foot, days to maturity, and suitability for our climate.  Then we created scores for each potential candidate to to help us decide how much of each vegetable to plant and when.

Excerpt from our vegetable scoring system

Next up is deciding when and where to plant.  You might be thinking, "Wow did they run a multivariate optimization to decide which vegetables to grow?  Losers."  No, we didn't do that.  We used our scores as a guide, with the understanding that this growing season will be all about trial and error.  Our favorites from this year will make the cut for next year's crop, we'll probably drop some, and add a few new ones too.  Based on our choices, here is a map of our garden for this year and a planting schedule:

Planting and harvesting schedule.

Garden map.

The observant reader will note that planting started way back in February.  Indeed!  In our next posts we will cover early season plantings and whatever else we can think of.

Dirt farmer

An unrelated, but great album

As I mentioned in the last post, when we ripped out the landscaping in our yard we found a lot of crap...rocks, broken bricks, glass, etc.  Also, we had heard from neighbors that our yard may have previously been a dump, which was worrying.  To get to the bottom of this, we called Alexandria City Hall, who told us that our yard hadn't been a dump site of any kind.  Still, not really prime gardening material.  So last fall we tried to beef up our soil.

The original plan was to buy fresh fill dirt from one of the many landscaping businesses.  But we needed 2-3 pickup truck loads, which would have cost a couple hundred dollars.  In the process of shopping around for cheap fill dirt, I stumbled across a couple of great resources for DC-area gardeners:  the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia (http://mgnv.org/) and the UVA ag extension office.

A lady from MGNV recommended that instead of buying fill dirt we improve our soil by adding organic matter.  So over the winter we've added organic matter in 3 ways.  First, we compost all of our food scraps with this:

We manage to fill it up about twice a month with vegetables, egg shells, and coffee grounds.  You can buy it on amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Gallon-Ceramic-Compost-Keeper/dp/B000K76CPK

Next, we took old cardboard boxes (amazon prime!) and laid them over the top of the dirt.  Sounds strange, but the lady from MGNV said it adds organic matter and attracts earth worms.

The last thing was to plant winter wheat as a cover crop.  This site talks about the benefits of cover cropping your garden: http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/factsheets/ecogardening/impsoilcov.html

All this dirt farming isn't attractive.  Our yard looked something like this all winter:

One last thing - the Virginia Cooperative Extension office offers soil testing kits that test your soil's PH, nutrient levels, etc. The cost is only $10 for in-state residents and $16 for out of state.  We didn't get around to doing this, but plan to for next year.  http://www.soiltest.vt.edu/

The yard

Here's what our yard looked like last June when we bought the house:


It looked pretty, but wasn't useful for much other than looking at. And breeding mosquitos. So we decided to rip most if it out.

 In the process of ripping out the plants and little fish pond, we found that the soil was full of little rocks and old broken glass.  The house was built in the 1890's, so at least one of the previous owners must not have been good at taking out the trash.

To clean up the soil, I bought a $5 turkey roasting tray at the grocery store, cut little holes into the bottom, and sifted through the most contaminated parts.  Probably not the most efficient way (took an afternoon), but at the end we had nice, glass-free soil.

After ripping out the landscaping and cleaning up the soil, we've done two major pieces of work: building a shed to keep our bikes in, and building raised garden beds.  Here's the end product (as of 2 weeks ago):

In the next few posts I'll get into more details about how we prepared our soil over the winter, and how we built the flower beds.

Kickoff!

Hello! Welcome to the Postage stamp garden blog, where I will post the adventures of setting up a productive vegetable garden in the small backyard of our home in Old Town Alexandria.

 My wife and I moved to Alexandria in June 2013. We've always thought it would be fun to have a garden, but have spent the last few years bouncing between cities and apartments and never had a chance. Now that we've settled down a bit we've decided its the perfect time to take a stab at a vegetable garden.

 Our back yard is a postage stamp, hence the blog's name. Undaunted, we've annexed a large chunk of it for the garden. We think it's a challenge to see how much we can grow, and hope to make our little garden more and more productive over the years as we learn what the hell we're doing.

 This blog will act as a journal on our gardening adventures this year. Our original plan was to just keep notes on my computer, but we thought other people might be interested. We'd love to hear from you about what you like on the blog. We'd also love to get feedback from experienced gardeners on what we're inevitably screwing up. Hope you enjoy it!