Eggplants, tomatoes, and beans, oh my!

Well, the end of July means a more exciting harvest.  The basil is getting bushy, the first little tomatoes are starting to turn orange then red, there are even some cayenne peppers starting to peek out from underneath old blossoms.  Yep, the hour of fruits is upon us!  (Now, people tend to think of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and beans as vegetables.  And sure, they are.  But as far as plant anatomy goes, the part we're eating is the fruit of the plant, the part with the seeds in it.)

Now is the time where we get to make more interesting dishes with the harvest.  Don't get me wrong, I love salads, but after 2 months of eating giant salads almost every day, I'm ready for a bit of a break.  Yesterday I made pesto with fresh basil and parsley from the garden, as well as some from our organic family farmer.  I modified a great recipe for 3-basil pesto from epicurious.com to include 5 types of basil in total.  I have some great lemon basil plants whose seeds were a gift from friends.  (Alyssa and Chris, it is as yummy as the name sounds!)  I also added some purple basil and Thai basil for extra flavor dimensions.  Blend together with Romano cheese, garlic, pine nuts, and a splash of olive oil and enjoy!  Pesto apparently freezes really well, so take advantage of bushels that you may be growing yourself or that are selling at your local farmers' market and stock up for the winter!

Cucurbit your enthusiasm

A vegetable garden is an amazing place for children to be in.  There are so many different things to learn and talk about.  I work in a collective garden as a children's coordinator with kids aged 2 to 8, and it's always interesting to see how they engage in the space.  I like to give informal gardening lessons to some of the older kids.  The cucurbit family (which includes cucumbers, melons, squash, and summer squash, like zucchini) is one of my favorite groups of plants to talk about.

These two cucumber flowers are male.  Note their very slender stems.

Cucumbers and their relatives have two different types of flowers, male, and female, which makes for an interesting conversation about pollination (They "boy" flower has to kiss the "girl" flower, and the bees help them...).  The first task is being able to tell the difference between male and female flowers.  Male flowers always have a very slender stem.  Female flowers have a thicker stem immediately below the base of the flower which resembles a miniature fruit.  The male flowers always come out first and in more numbers than the fruit-bearing female flowers.  The ratio of male to female flowers can also change on any given plant too.  Usually if the plant suffers from water or nutrient stress it will put out mostly male flowers and few females.  Bees play a critical role in all cucurbit fruit production.  Unlike tomato flowers, which can be pollinated by the wind, cucurbit flowers must be

This cucumber flower is female; the stem looks like a mini cuke

visited by bees between 15-20 times for successful fruit set. As the female flowers are often open for only a few hours on one day, timing is critical and it is very helpful to have a surplus of male pollen donors around.  If the female flower is not adequately pollinated, the fruit will not set and you will see the stem turn yellow and drop off.  If you're having problems with a lack of pollination, consider introducing bees to your garden or entice them by planting flowers.  Bramble plants (raspberries, roses, and blackberries, etc) are an excellent bee attractor with their abundant pollen and sweet smells.

When the fruit does come, having too much ripening on the vine temporarily slows female flower output.  Picking the fruit regularly (especially on cucumbers and summer squash) will encourage more fruit development.


Looking for cucumber beetles is another excellent activity.  These yellow and black striped beetles like to eat the flowers, fruits, and roots, of all cucurbit family members, and may even spread bacterial wilt disease.  They are often found on the flowers of cucurbits, which

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cucumber_beetle.jpg

provide an ideal mating "pad."  When the beetles are found, pick them off the flower (they don't bite) and squish them immediately!  It is important to check both open and closed flowers for the beetles as they may crawl inside and are not always immediately visible.  After a couple minutes and several beetles, the kids in my garden have become expert beetle spotters and squishers, and are eager to find the next one.

Greens go swimming and green onion upgrades

It's pretty amazing to come back from a two-week vacation and see how much everything has grown!!  A huge thanks for my friends who stopped by to water and sample radishes.  You did excellent work!  But of course there is always much to do in the garden, so as soon as my suitcase was in the door I was out in the front doing some surveying.  The tomatoes had to be tied up, the weeds needed a lesson in humility, one giant sunflower seemed to have given up on life, and of course, harvest!

Harvesting is the best work, reaping the bounty of the labour.  I gathered a huge bag full of greens, most of which had bolted in my absence, so I had no choice but to pull the whole plant out.  Lettuce, arugula, pak choi, radishes - most of each crop came out (I need to seed more!).  My mustard greens had grown very big, but no signs of bolting so I just picked a few outer leaves from each plant to add some spiciness to the salad.  I had a nice harvest of snow peas which we tossed into stir fry that evening.  The swiss chard has made a fantastic recovery from the leaf miners (no neem oil was applied, but I did check daily for eggs and maggots before I left), and a few leaves can be harvested.  My 'multiplier green onions' seemed to be living up to their name and had not only grown to almost two feet tall, but the bulbs were expanding away from each other at the surface of the earth.  I cut off the greens just above the surface, then dug up and separated the bulbs and replanted them.  I'm not sure if that's what I'm supposed to do, but we'll see if that experiment works.  I had so many green onion trimmings I offered them to some neighbors in my building and across the street.  One of them offered me a beer in exchange for the fresh shoots.  Not a bad upgrade!

Greens go swimming

When harvesting greens, it's best to do it early in the morning before it gets too hot.  This way the plants haven't started to transpire too much and won't wilt as fast.  Later in the morning and throughout the day the leaves pump are pumping water (transpiring) through them from the roots and out through their pores (stomata).  When the leaves are picked they continue to transpire but their water source has been severed so they become dehydrated and wilt.  However, if you're like me, you won't be one of the first creatures moving about in the garden in the day and you'll find yourself harvesting in the heat.  Not to worry.  Simply bring a bucket of water with you into the garden and dunk the leaves in immediately after picking them.  This will both supply them with water and cool them off so they reduce their transpiration.  Ice water would be great but cool tap water works well too. Or you could just pick your produce and carry it into the kitchen when your done and soak them in the sink.  That works too.  However, it's best not to wait too long from the time of harvest till the leaves go swimming - you don't want the shriveling to go too far!

So, what are you growing?

If you really want to know... here's what we're growing in the garden:

Arugula
Basil - Italian

From the left: Purple basil, Italian basil, lemon basil

Basil - Lemon
Basil - Purple
Basil - Thai
Beans, bush - French filet
Beans, pole - Blue lake
Beans, pole - Yard long, climbing
Beets -Touchstone gold

Calendula
Carrot - Purple Dragon
Carrot - Berlicum 2
Chamomile
Chives

Cilantro
Cucumber - Marketmore
Cucumber - Pickling
Cucumber - sultan
Cucumber - thunder


Dill
Echinacea
Ground cherry

Swiss chard and blue curled Scotch kale

Kale - winterbor
Kale - blue curled scotch
Lavender - English
Lavender - French
Lemon balm

Lettuce - red and 2 green varieties
Marigold

Mint - chocolate
Mint - pineapple
Mint - spearmint

Mustard greens
Onions - green multiplier

Pak choi - Tah tsai
Parsley - Moss
Parsley - Italian

Peas - snow
Pepper - carmen (sweet red)
Pepper, hot - Cayenne
Pepper, hot - Bulgarian carrot

Radish - Cherry belle

Hawaiian currant tomatoes are on their way!!

Rhubarb
Rosemary
Sage
Sunflower - giant
Sunflower - paquito
Swiss chard -  Bright lights

Tomato - Hawaiian currant
Tomato - Matt's wild cherry
Tomato - Potato leaf
Tomato - Purple Russian
Yarrow
Zucchini - Contours Dorés

Lawns to Loaves

As a first post for me, Mat here, I admit that this a bit lazy. And those of you who know me, know I'm not exactly the biggest sports fan... but, as a Vancouverite away from home, I can't help but get wrapped up in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup. Watching it as I write in fact, and have Vancouver in my mind.

So for those of you who have a lawn and want to do something more useful than feed non-edible grass, this is for you.

A great new initiative from the Environmental Youth Alliance Society in Vancouver.

From the Vancouver Sun, June 15:

Make room for a wheat field beside the chicken coop

From chicken coops in backyards and vegetable plots at city hall, Vancouver is branching out into experimental wheat plots in place of lawns.

The idea of replacing turf with a waving patch of yellow grain is among a list of ideas the Vision Vancouver-led council is considering for this year's Greenest City Neighbourhood grants allocations.

On Thursday, council will be asked to give a youth group, Environmental Youth Alliance Society, $5,000 for a pilot project called "Lawns to Loaves -A Collaborative City Wheat Field." The society has 30 homeowners willing to replace their lawns with small-scale grain production. It is also working with two eastside schools, Windermere and Vancouver Technical, to teach students about the origin and history of grain and where their bread comes from.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Make+room+wheat+field+beside+chicken+coop/4948581/story.html#ixzz1POYY5fQh

Leaf Miners Discovered!

Arugula leaf affected by leaf miners (upper leaf) and a healthy leaf (below).

In the past couple of weeks we noticed the swiss chard hasn't been looking great.  The leaves were greying and sections between the veins were limp.  I initially thought the leaves might be getting sunburned, having recently be transplanted, so I tried to ignore it, thinking it would get better over time as the plants adjusted to life outside.

But it didn't get better.  Yesterday I picked off a dying leaf and studied it carefully.  To my horror I saw, between the layers of the leaf itself, a white maggot, leisurely chomping away at the tasty tissue of the chard.  There were three or four of them in that leaf alone.  I tossed the leaf to the ground and raced inside to look up "chard leaf miner" online.  Sure enough, many people are dealing with this problem and have written about it on their own blogs.  Here's a quick summary of what I've learned about the leaf miner:

The little white lump is the maggot inside the leaf.

First off, there are hundreds of different species of leaf miners, all of them pretty specific to plant types or families.  So the chard leaf miner will also be found on spinach and beet leaves, all members of the Chenopodiaceae family (sure enough they had got to some of my beet leaves!).  They are the larvae of flies, moths, or butterflies that lay eggs on the undersides of leaves, often making a small cut in the surface of the leaf.  When the eggs hatch the larvae crawl in and around the leaf feeding on its tissue.  They can crawl down into the stem of the leaf or even the entire plant.  It will go into a pupa stage in or on the leaf then fly away as an adult to mate.  They can reproduce several generations over the course of the summer so they will cause an ongoing problem if not managed.

If you notice the signs immediately remove the affected leaves and put them in the trash or burn them.  DO NOT PUT THEM IN YOUR COMPOST!  They will propagate and perpetuate the problem!  You can also look on the undersides of the leaves for the eggs:  small, white ovals lying parallel to each other not more than 1mm long.  If you spot the eggs simply brush them off.  You should keep a close eye on the plants for the rest of the season.  Several people recommend a weekly spraying of neem oil as an organic treatment.  It's pressed from the seed of the neem tree, so it's a natural product that poses no threat to the environment.  It's also quite safe for humans, and apparently the plant has been used for medicinal purposes in India for thousands of years.  Another suggestion is using row covers around the affected plants to keep the flies off.  Row covers are a very fine mesh that let sun and water in but keep the bugs out.  If these solutions don't work and the bugs become too much of a problem one site suggested pulling up the plants and waiting till September to grow them.  The weather will be cooler which the plants tolerate well but which will kill the bugs.

~ ~ ~

Out in the garden today following up on the plants I noticed some of my arugula, kale, and even my mustard greens showed signs of leaf miners.  Because these are members of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae, not the chard/ spinach family) I knew I had another species of leaf miner on my hands.  Fortunately, the damage did not appear to be nearly as extensive as with the chard and I removed the few leaves that were affected.  Hopefully there won't be a problem with them for the rest of the season, however, vigilance is required!  My poor chard was stripped down to just the tiniest leaves at the center of the plants.  Hopefully they will be able to make a comeback over the season.

For more reading, here's the link to a great leaf miner identification site.  It has information on hundreds of leaf miner species with an index listed by the affected plant names.