Perkins Update

While some things have been a real challenge this year, other things are going amazingly well. The new electric fence means that we have un-nibbled lettuce this year. Add to this the discovery of a good variety of buttercrunch and a good variety of romaine and we have some serious lettuce available.

Carrots are also doing amazingly well in the hard, clay soil at Perkins. I tried five different varieties to see what works, and the four that have been in long enough are all producing reasonable carrots.

Even the sorry-looking eggplants I reported on earlier are now bouncing back.

But we're still waiting for the first of the broccoli and we discovered clubroot in one corner of the garden. Next year I'll just have to get out there a spread 50-pounds of lime between the first and second tilling.

But the best surprise of all has been the value of floating row cover. Below are two photos of cucumbers. The scraggly ones planted by the trellis were planted two weeks before the big, healthy-looking ones in the other photo. But without serving as the singles bar for disease-spreading cucumber beetles, the later cucumbers have surpassed the earlier ones and promise to produce much healthier fruit. The same results appear to be happening with the pac choi and mustard greens planted under row cover and protected from flea beetles.



Things we've eaten from Perkins so far this year:
Mixed salad greens
Radishes
Garlic scapes
Arugula
Chard
Spinach
Mustard Greens
Broccoli raab
Carrots
Snow peas
Shell peas
Purple bush beans
Golden zucchini
Green onions
Cipolini onions
Basil
Dill

As for our venture into selling our surplus produce, we've almost paid for our seed costs. This week, some surplus basil and green onions will be sold to the chef at the Amway Grand for use at Cygnus 27 and the 1913 Room.

Fighting Critters

While the excessive rain has probably been the biggest challenge to gardening this spring and early summer, I've been taking on a couple of other pests as well.

I went to the garden one evening in mid June to find that some rabbits had snatched three broccoli plants and snacked on some Swiss chard. Fortunately, they had not yet found the romaine and bibb lettuce.

Thinking back to the previous year and the ways in which my full-sized broccoli consistently got nibbled away, I decided I had had enough. I drove on up to Family Home & Garden that night and plunked down the cash for the materials for a solar-charged electric fence.

I got half of it set up the next night before some thunderstorms rolled in, and then the rest set up on the next day. Upon being plugged in, the fence put out a decent charge. If you're wearing sneakers, the charge is not much, but if you touch the fence while simultaneously touching the ground with a bare hand, the shock is unmistakable and has you impulsively snatching away your hand from the fence.


The second battle is with the bugs. A few weeks ago, I put floating row cover over some newly planted cucumbers. Protected from the striped cucumber beetles, the covered plants took off and grew more vigorously than the uncovered plants seeded two week earlier.

With this success, I decided to put floating row cover over some other crops planted this weekend. I planted a row of pac choi and a row of mustard, two plants viciously attacked by flea beetles this spring. Given the hoards of European cabbage moths flying about the garden, I also planted some fall broccoli and cabbage under the row cover as well.

So now my thoughts turn to how to fill up the little remaining space in the garden bed, and how to use the space that will soon be vacated by spinach, onions, and other greens. During the next week, I think I'll maker a summer planting of the following crops: peas, romaine and bibb lettuce, spinach and some large Spanish radishes.