Monthly Archives: August 2010

Mulching My Garden Beds

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Once a week I mow the lawn and I often use the grass clippings as mulch on my beds. Leaves and small sticks collected by the lawnmower can be used too:

A bed of leeks has been prepared this way:

When you have a layer of mulch the weeds have a hard time reaching the light and won’t take over your beds. This is my old cauliflower and broccoli bed, and as you can see the weeds are forced to grow around the edges of the bed instead:

And that’s just because I’m lazy – the weeds could easily be removed from the pathways.

In the strawberry beds the layer of mulch has been effective too:

The idea of mulching is something I picked up from Lynn Mentgen-Gillespie when I read her ebook about cinder block gardens.

Mulch also keeps the moisture in the soil but I don’t think there have been any problems with drought around here this year, in fact just the opposite, which is why the blight has been thriving. This is how it starts on tomatoes – small brown spots, growing bigger and bigger:

until the tomatoes are ready to be thrown into the thrash:

I just hope I’ll get a few ripe tomatoes this year, from 17 plants(!) but I’m beginning to have some doubts:

At least the cucumber plants are doing fine. I found this little guy taking a sunbath on one of the leaves:

Please leave a comment below if you know the species, or want to share your thoughts.

Saving Arugula Seeds

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Last year I saved seeds from spinach and the seeds turned into healthy plants. This success inspired me to look at other plants that I could do the same with, so after a nice harvest of arugula leaves for salads I let the plants bolt. What a mess:

Pods with seeds have been formed that look like this:

Below on the left you’ll find a bunch arugula plants ready for drying along with spinach plants on the right:

I’ll let the plants hang there until they are completely dry. Maybe I’ll have to put a bag below the arugula plants if the seeds starts falling out of the pods after a while. The spinach seeds will stay on the stems, that’s for sure. It will actually take some work to pick off the seeds.

Much of my garden bed space is free at the moment as several crops have been harvested, including peas, spinach, arugula, carrots and potatoes. I have now prepared this space with seeds for green manure plants: Buckwheat, Crimson clover and common vetch:

I’ll have to reserve some bed space for new strawberry plants as the old plants are growing like crazy at the moment sending out runners in all directions:

I plan on planting these new small plants in their own bed and harvest strawberries from them next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to harvest berries from the old plants too, but if I won’t I’m counting on these new cloned plants.

The wind is still strong here and the apples keep falling of the trees but it turned out to be a bad idea to put the apples in a pile due to wasps thinking they own the place. Besides, the kids like to play with the apples in the pile – yuck:

The potatoes and tomatoes hit by blight looks nasty too and all of it will go into the garbage can to minimize the spread of blight:

Rescuing My Tomato Plants

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When I find these new shoots on my tomato plants I normally pinch them off to force the plant to focus its energy on the developing fruits instead of foliage, but now that all of my plants are affected by blight I suddenly find myself welcoming these new shoots as they provide much needed foliage since the old has been damaged or wilted away:

Luckily it seems that the leaves affected with blight just dries up and breaks off and don’t cause damage to the main stem of the tomato plant:

I removed the affected foliage and tomatoes and the plants are beginning to look healthy again:

Time will tell if they’ll survive long enough to produce mature tomatoes. As you can see in the picture above there are not many leaves left to do the work.

… which is exactly the problem with my broccoli and cauliflowers too – them caterpillars hungry!:

What I should have done was to grow these plants in a tunnel so that the mother of these caterpillars couldn’t have laid her eggs on the plants when they were small.

Oh well – I’m actually proud that the plants grew this big. Besides the damage done by caterpillars the plants look really healthy. Next year I’ll build a tunnel. And oh – we actually did harvest one broccoli, a real nice one too.