Garden Pictures

Garden Summary

The overriding theme of the 2008 gardening season was rain. In stark contrast to 2007, we watered the garden fewer than five times all season.

Unfortunately, many of our garden Sundays and Wednesdays were washed out, so it was difficult to sustain a steady volunteer base. Nonetheless, a core group of 5-10 people came out when the weather was pleasant enough to work, and on some sunny afternoons fifteen people gardened together.

The last spring frost may have been May 28 (this was the last frost that damaged our plants, in any case). The first fall frost was no later than October 7.

Crops

All of the plants in the onion family did well this year. The garlic we planted in the fall of 2007 did phenomenally well. Some garlic from 2006 that had died out in the hot summer of 2007 volunteered itself this year and bounced back. Garlic scapes proved to be a tender and delicious treat.

Our leeks were also a big success. We planted two beds of them, and watching them grow from spindly frail plant strands to thick delicious vegetables was rewarding. We did not harvest all of the leeks we planted, but as they winter well the gardeners of 2009 will be able to enjoy the surplus harvest.

This year we successfully planted some unusual crops. Three artichoke plants thrived, and one of them unexpectedly bore fruit. We planted some asparagus plants which survived the summer and will hopefully yield a harvest in the future. We planted raspberries which produced a few fruits, and the strawberry plants we transplanted did surprisingly well, producing berries well into October.

Our eggplants were attacked by flea beetles early in the season. We lost faith in them, but they showed us a thing or two by bouncing back and giving us some eggplants. Although not as exuberant as last year, our peppers and tomatoes did reasonably well (although the tomatoes were afflicted by a blight). This year we planted more sweet peppers than hot ones, which was probably a wise decision.

Squash and watermelon got off to a slow start, but they also ended up thriving. Our watermelons did not ripen until the very end of the season, however.

For some reason our beets and chard struggled this year.

We planted a row of nasturtiums as a decoy plant for flea beetles. This strategy did not quite work, but our nasturtiums grew hale and hearty, and provided delicious flowers and spicy leaves for salads.

Because the season was reasonably cool this year, we had reasonable success planting lettuces. In the fall we planted a second crop of lettuce and radish that grew slowly but did okay.

Surprisingly, our potatoes did significantly better than last year. This may be because we rototilled the potato beds fairly deeply, and we mounded extra soil on top of the beds for the potatoes. At least one of the potato plants produced big red potatoes that any grocery store would be proud of. Given the high clay content of our soil this was a good accomplishment.

Once again we had volunteer crops: the aforementioned garlic, several tomato plants and quite a bit of fennel.

Soil and Other Infrastructure

Quite a few crops were assisted by the truckful of compost we added to the garden this year. We had plans to add sand to the beds to offset the incredible clay content, but unfortunately there was a mix-up with the supplier, and this did not happen.

Several people donated carpet, which along with a load of woodchips we used to reinforce the garden paths.

We made arrangements with Food Services to get compost (and lots of plastic buckets!) for our composter. We successfully made a few deliveries, and would like to establish a more regular collection schedule in the future.

This year we introduced a log book in the shed, and we started developing the habit of keeping it updated with our exploits.

We had a successful planting party in the Winter term, during which we started leeks, squash, cabbages, eggplant, tomatoes and many of the other seedlings we ended up planting in the garden.

Disease and Pests

Bindweed continued to taunt us this year, but thanks to diligent weeding we managed to keep it more-or-less under control. We had some discussion of whether we should be throwing bindweed into the compost for fear that it just spreads the weed, but we did not implement any consistent practices here. We did keep most of the blighted tomato plants out of our compost, however.

Our tomatoes did get blight this year. Suspiciously, the blight started in the same bed in which our celery and cabbages suffered from rot last year.

Although our squashes did fairly well, they were afflicted with both striped cucumber beetles and ugly grey squash bugs.

Perhaps the most frustrating mammalian pest this year were the groundhogs, which ravished beans, peas, lettuce, beets, chard, all of our brassicas and many of our other tender plants. Putting fences around individual beds did help a bit, but we lost several crops. We almost managed to get a fence put up this year; but stalled when it came to verifying post locations with the Region of Waterloo. Hopefully the gardeners of 2009 will succeed in finishing the fencing project to keep critters away.

In addition to groundhogs mice ate some of our peppers and radishes, and we have suspicions that the deer again visited us to nibble on our pepper plants.

Maddy Rosamond prepared a photographic catalogue of weeds and pests for the garden this year.