Gidget's next door neighbors

Yesterday was a treat at Gidget's Garden. My neighbor, Maria, and her beautiful cousin, Larisa, came over to do some garden stuff with me. Using the garden to help peak young people's interest in growing their own food is one of the things I am most thrilled about.

Larisa was really excited about being in the garden, and she especially loved the yellow pear cherry tomatoes. I was happy that we had about seven of them that were ripe and ready for her to eat. Maria and I had one too - they really are delicious.

Larisa and a yellow pear cherry tomato

We planted some seeds together so she can grow her own tomatoes, peppers, and some flowers.

Gidget helps Larisa plant her seeds

Larisa's seeds topped off with worm poop

We even found a zucchini for her to take home.

Larisa was thrilled with her zucchini

Maria worked on adding some embellishment to an old pot for a miniature eggplant that she is going to grow.

Frijole observes Larisa learning about being a perfectionist

Maria and Larisa heading home with hands full of vegetables and flowers. 

Days like this are what I live for. It was so much fun to spend time with these beautiful ladies who are as enthusiastic as I am about plants.

Our seeds are popping up ahead of schedule which made the day even more exciting.

This week's eats

We had another tasty week at the garden. Next week is promising to be even better and I am doing my best to make certain that all of our weeks are tasty from here on out.

I won't bore you with all of them, but the zucchini was abundant this week. You may be wondering why I don't let them get bigger; I just like them best when they are about this size, they are tastier. We have a couple that got away from me on the plants so you'll probably see those next week.

One of four zucchinis

We had some strawberries. Farmer D doesn't seem to care much about them but they sure make me happy and I love to share.

Some of this week's strawberries

We had nice fixin's for a good salad in this bunch:

3 sister tomato, purple bell pepper, pear cherry tomatoes, and 3 pepperocinis 

A Gidget's Garden salad with tomatoes, pepperocinis, purple bell pepper, and fresh garden herbs. 

We harvested our first pink lemonade lemon yesterday but have not tried it yet. We'll keep you posted. 

It's a tiny ear of corn, but it was perfect.

We're early yet for corn and I just know Farmer D's pollination  technique made this first ear way better than it would have been otherwise. I ate it raw about 10 seconds after taking the photo. It was delicious.

Gidget was so excited about the harvest she was floating on air.

Growing avocados

The jewel of Gidget's Garden is her avocado tree. It came with the house and was already long established. Our best guess is that it was planted in 1967, the same time the patio next to it was poured, according to the child like engraving in the corner.

When I moved here eight years ago, the tree was not in the best shape, and we weren't too concerned about doing much about it. I cut open one of the fallen avocados and it was a bad one. Now looking back, I think a worm found it's way inside destroying the inner fruit, and making it look disgusting. That experience turned me off for a couple of years but then, after changing my whole perspective about food and becoming a nutritionist, I had a change of heart.

I decided to give these babies another shot and discovered that they're actually the best tasting avocados I've ever eaten and they're the biggest anyone has ever seen. I decided I better start taking good care of our tree because it is an amazing source of beautiful food for us.

This is what the tree was enduring when I finally decided it needed a better life

The avocado tree after adding a container "fence" and mulching the leaves on top

A little bit of research revealed that avocados like to feed off of their own leaves and mulching those leaves around the tree will help keep it happy. This has made our tree happier, so has a regular schedule of feeding it with a citrus food, and watering it well on a regular basis. Now we make growing the biggest, best tasting avocados you have ever seen look extremely easy.

They may be the world's best avocados

I don't know how well we would do if this tree was not already so established and willing to put up with our years of neglect before we got a clue. San Diego is certainly a wonderful place to try growing your own avocados though, as they are flourishing all over the city.

We've been trying to convince Gidget that avocado trees don't really need much pruning but it's one of her favorite tasks in the garden.

Last year's crop was spectacular.

Avocados hanging on tree last year

Farmer D picking avocados

A tiny portion of the avocados we enjoyed last year

After having this success and seeing the way that people react to our monster avocados, I decided to grow a whole bunch of these seeds so we could spread this tree around, and help others enjoy such a great food source. 

As of now we have been unable to identify the variety, and I just found out the county of San Diego's agriculture folks don't know either. They will be classified as miscellaneous on our seller's certificate. I'll be calling them our Golden Hill Hybrid.

There are several ways to sprout avocados but I prefer Mom's method

My excitement about spreading these avocados across the city quickly diminished. It didn't take long for me to learn that this baby has to be a tree for seven years before discovering if it will even fruit. Then if it does fruit, there's no telling what variety the fruit will be. It could be any one of the number of varieties that are nearby in my neighborhood.

I was introduced to the concept of grafting, which is required to guarantee that your tree will produce this variety. Grafting is a process in which a piece of the tree you want is fused onto another and then the plant becomes the variety you want. That's my basic knowledge on the subject but I do plan to investigate it more and start playing with it because it is the only way to ensure you are growing this specific variety, and I would love to see our avocados live on throughout the city.

In the meantime, they are a very valuable resource for us, and even work as cash when you frequent yard sales.

A couple of items that we purchased with avocados last year; an adorable table above, and a gorgeous hand painted pot below. The container garden "fence" around the tree was also purchased almost entirely with avocados. 

The next generation of avocados is on the tree growing, and we look forward to sharing them with our customers at the Golden Hill Farmer's market, when they're ready. We're not exactly sure when that will be but we're hoping for Fall.  

Baby Golden Hill Hybrid avocados growing on tree.

Fleck is much more interested in carrot season. 

Garden chores

It was an exhausting weekend in the garden but I don't mind. I sleep well after working hard and I really enjoy good sleep.

Gidget catching a nap on Saturday in between supervising us in her garden

We had more tags to make and still have to go through and make sure all the plants are labeled. I was hoping to make some of my labels cute and artistic but that hope quickly faded. I found myself wishing that Son-Man of Sonny San Diego was here to "show" me repeatedly how to make them look fabulous. He is the man that made the stunning Gidget's Garden sign on top of the page and I have a feeling he would have needed to intervene if he had seen me attempting to be artistic.

Once I reached the pinnacle of my creativity, I decided it was time just to get them done and move on

I filled this swimming pool with seed pots and labeled them.

We hope to have some vegetable starts to sell at the market and will have plants ready for our second warm season. The swimming pool allows for the pots to be watered from below. The weather is currently warm enough that placing this (it's completely full of pots now), on a level surface in a sunny spot should do the trick.

Normally I would use FoxFarm soil for starting seeds but in the interest of saving some cash, I decided to try Grandma's soil and Worm castings to start these seeds.

Grandma Mary's potting mix

Organic worm castings

Then we had to feed everyone and add some fresh compost. As you add more plants to your garden, this becomes a bigger project. If you don't have time for this on a regular basis then an EarthBox garden may be a great idea for you because you only have to feed it once for the whole growing season. 

Adding compost after feeding sugar baby watermelons

I even had time to devise a sling for our mystery squash, thanks to my helpful neighbor, who gave up her knee high pantyhose. We have no choice but to pull this squash up and run it along the frame on one of our beds. It is becoming a monster that is overtaking the garden. I would not have planted it where it is on purpose, it was a volunteer that just showed up. In hindsight, I probably should have pulled it like a weed. Now I am completely invested in it, so I am going to try to get something off of it. The fruit needs to be supported so it does not get too heavy for the plant.

Mystery squash in sling

Overall it was a very productive weekend. With the beautiful weather in San Diego, even hard work in the garden seems like a treat.

Photo of the week

Japanese eggplant bloom

Label your plants and save a headache

It's a beautiful morning at Gidget's Garden and it is going to be a busy day in the garden. The plants need to be fed, trimmed, and debugged, weeds need to be pulled, and flowers need dead heading but that's nothing out of the ordinary, there are lots of chores that we expect to do on a very regular basis.

In addition to those things, I have to do some more preparation for the inspection to get our certificate to sell at the Golden Hill Farmer's Market. The person who encouraged me to apply to sell was kind enough to make sure that I knew I needed to have all of our plants labeled before our inspection. This makes sense but it means some work for me.

Labeling your babies is always a good idea because even in a small garden, it's easy to forget what is what. You'll probably be able to identify a pepper plant as a pepper plant, but if you want to know what variety of pepper you are anticipating, then I would suggest you label your plants well. I am not great at this, and now I have a headache, because it has to be done now.

This was labeled but the sun sanitized it within a couple of weeks. 

To be fair to myself, I actually did try to be better about labeling this year, but I did not know that Sharpie markers are not UV resistant so all of the labels I put in are now blank again. One way to deal with this is to place the label in a shady spot under the plant but that's not possible when labeling a seedbed. I decided I need to invest in some other materials to help me keep my plants labeled.

I secured some paint markers hoping they may be more UV resistant

Labels

I also used the sharpie again for plants that I know are now providing enough shade to hopefully prevent the labels from fading. The metal tags are for our perennials. They are great in that you write on them and it leaves an indentation in the tag so fading does not occur. I also wrote over the indentation with a sharpie for easier reading.

Label on Avocado tree

In addition to labels for the hundreds of plants that I may or may not have anything from, to sell at the market, I need to get some seeds started, and labeled, today too. We are planning on building a real greenhouse in the near future but for now, a kiddie pool is going to be the beginning of a make shift one. I'll write more about that and the success of it in a future post.

2 kiddie pools for temporary, makeshift "greenhouses"

100 pots for seedlings

Even if you aren't going to go through the application process to sell at a farmer's market, it is a very good practice to clearly label all of your plants. If you plant more than a couple of varieties of a certain vegetable, it will be hard to remember in a month from now, which variety you put where.

Gidget is inspecting our Iceberg rose for the label

The Fungus among us; early blight on tomatoes

This is not so good. Not so good at all. Some of our tomatoes are showing signs of early blight, which if left untreated could potentially decimate not only our tomatoes, but also our beans, cucumbers, eggplant, and peppers. We have also started to see signs of powdery mildew on our roses and our mystery squash plant.

Brown spots and yellow of leaves are signs of early blight. Yellow Pear Cherry Tomato

Last year when we had this problem, I was not quite as serious about the garden, and maximizing my yields as I am now. This year, I am really hoping to have some beautiful produce to sell at the market, and I saw how badly this and other fungus can affect our plants so I want to prevent it from spreading throughout this plant and to other plants.

Powdery mildew on mystery squash

There are several things to consider when trying to prevent the spread of fungus:

• Plants should be rotated throughout the garden. Once a plant is affected with early blight, you should not grow other susceptible plants in that area for 3 years.
• People can be one of the main causes of spreading this disease. If you touch a plant that is infected then it is important to wash your hands well before touching unaffected plants in the garden.
• Tools should be disinfected after coming in contact with affected plants.
• Plants need good circulation to help prevent the spread of fungus.
• Don't add infected foliage to your compost
• Avoid wetting the leaves when watering your plants, as fungus find wet leaves irresistible.
• Trim bottom leaves, and stake plants to keep foliage off the soil.

Once you have blight, or other fungus such as powdery mildew, you will want to try and prevent it from spreading to the rest of the plant, and to your other plants in the garden. Many people use milk in a 1:9 ratio with water and spray it on the leaves of the plants every 7 to 10 days to get fungus under control. We do not drink much milk in our house and I wouldn't want to buy some just to have it go to waste.

I took Farmer Bill's advice and picked up some liquid copper concentrate. This product does not have an OMRI logo which gave me pause, but Bill assured me, copper is suitable for organic gardening. I verified that when I got home. I like the idea of copper as a nutritionist, because I know it as an anti fungal, and anti bacterial for humans too. Copper knobs and ducting in hospitals have been shown to reduce the spread of bacterial infections such as MRSA. As always when spraying something in the garden, I waited until it cooled in the evening, and made sure there were no beneficial insects present before spraying. I applied it to all of the plants that are susceptible last night and will continue to treat them every 7-10 days to help kill new spores before they can spread.

I am also going to use some corn meal on the soil as it is known to attract beneficial fungus while eliminating the kind that destroys your plants. A cornmeal milk can also be used to spray on the leaves. You can soak a cup of cornmeal in 1 gallon of water overnight, and then strain the liquid to use to spray.

With so many issues, Gidget is not convinced we are qualified to manage her garden.

Large raised garden bed

Earlier in the week we introduced you to our strawberries, and now we would like to show our biggest raised bed. Hopefully we can help you with ideas about ways you could maximize space and prevent mistakes in your own raised beds.

This particular bed is 3 feet by 10 feet and constructed of 2x12 untreated lumber. We placed heavy weed block under it and also put hardware cloth under it to prevent weeds and gophers. Our soil mix came from City Farmers Nursery.

Our biggest raised bed

We added tall stakes all around the bed to use to help support the plants. We added a trellis on the south side of the bed, but we should have put it on the north side, to reduce the shading the plants on the trellis will cause for the other plants in the bed. We are going to see how it goes in our garden this time around, and if shading does become too much of a problem, we may have to move it to the north side.

Cucumber plants climbing up trellis

I used #10 eye screws that I screwed into the box and then used sisal twine to weave the trellis.

Once we built the box, prevented weeds and gophers, and hauled umpteen loads of dirt to fill the box, we were free to start planting. We also added the appropriate amount of FoxFarm fertilizer to the soil mix. I planned in advance what should or could go where to maximize the variety and yield I could get out of the area.

The bed with sections drawn out for different plants and ready for seeds April 6, 2011

We tried to start some of our own seeds indoors in advance but had limited success so I decided to try putting some seeds straight in the bed in the sections I had designated for them. We had some success with this and some failure. We ended up filling in with 4 inch plant starts that we bought where we didn't get seeds. We are planning a small greenhouse so we can have more success with seed starting in the future and start all of our plants from seed. We are also learning how to save some of our own seed.

The east end of the bed

There are several Japanese cucumbers climbing on the trellis. In front are sugar baby watermelons, a very small variety, but the plants will still continue to spill over the edge of the bed and occupy the space I am standing in to take the photo. Behind the watermelon is a variety of peppers, and there are two different eggplants behind those.

The west end of the bed

The tomato on the left is a Roma and on the right is a Better Boy. There are some beans and more cucumbers on the side and in back. There's a six pack of marigolds that I plan to disperse throughout the entire garden to brighten up the place and hopefully attract more beneficial insects. Behind the marigold is a tomatillo and the pink flower is an Aster.

Trellis on the west end of the bed, the green beans have been struggling along. Frijole is not impressed.

The back of the bed

There are several lemon cucumbers and more Japanese cucumbers starting to find their way up the trellis, and there are some more green beans, struggling to take off about halfway down the bed. I put another cucumber in the pot at the far end to take advantage of the trellis. Growing cucumbers on the trellis saves space and keeps them off the ground so they have less chance of getting bug bitten or damaged.

There are endless possibilities for planting a bed this size and it can be a lot of fun. I am going to try and squeeze some lettuce in between some of the taller plants, near the trellis, where there is space and a little shade.

Gidget doesn't seem happy about this post