The past two weeks we have been blessed with rain. Not alot, but some just about every night. So the garden is smiling, the plants are singing.
After two weeks of working away at it, we have another section of garden ready for planting. The volunteers are eager to add all sorts of veggies, in fact, 10 times more than the space we have ready. But gee, that's great. It means we have another goal in mind.... prepare another section of garden. So today we actually started hacked down the giant tall weeds and moving them off. And the hard job of rock removal has begun yet again.
During these past two weeks we have added more plantings to the garden: french radishes, beans, cucumbers, lettuce, chard, assorted herbs, and jicama. And we have watermelon, summer squash, plus more beans and potatoes ready to go in.
Harvests are a regular job now : potatoes, daikon, radishes, kohlrabi, onions, snap beans (green, purple, and filet), snow peas, and assorted herbs. Volunteers have been tasting many herbs for their first time, herbs such as salad burnet, summer savory, cutting celery.
The past ten days we have been doing exactly what we aimed for when we started this garden...... getting food and food plants to the people of Ka'u. We have been both selling and giving these away, depending upon the situation. At the farmers' market we help people with their gardening questions and suggest which are the easy veggies to grow for the new gardeners. It has been very satisfying.
June 13th
Our gardening group consists of several experienced growers, but we still have failures that gives us the opportunity to learn new things.
Radishes: best sown in small blocks twice a week rather than one bigger block every two weeks.
Daikon: better in container beds for us because the roots grow so long. We have rototilled the ground down 6 inches, but that is not deep enough to make nicely formed daikon roots. Our daikon came out with 90 degree angles at 6 inches.
Row and aisle width: It is far easier to straddle a 2 foot wide row while weeding and harvesting. Any wider is too wide. We found that single rows of plants are not efficient in producing lots of food, and anyway that method was created for tractors and plows. We work the garden by hand, so a two foot wide bed works well.
Mulch and slugs: the slugs love the mulch, so we have to pay attention to keep slugs under control.
Gourds: give them more space. Whatever you think is enough room, double it!
Cucumbers: have seedlings ready to replant with once a month. We found that the plants "get old" about a month into production, so it is better to replant.
Have beans in small plantings separated from each other. Whitefly has found some of our small bean patches, but not others. Anywhere the bean rows are side by side, the whitefly eventually takes over both rows. But by skipping the rows around, the whitefly doesn't find it all.
June 18th
Today was an active planting day at the garden. 6 news varieties of potatoes were added, plus three types of beets (a red, a gold, and a white). More french breakfast radishes. Patty Pan summer squash. More cucumbers. Two varieties of snap beans. Two types of snow peas. We had used the rototiller to till compost and biochar into the beds where we had previously harvested all the potatoes, snap beans, and peas. We don't replant a bed with the same vegetable again. Instead, we switch to a different type of veggie. For example, after the potatoes we planted beets. After the peas we planted potatoes. After the snap beans we planted radishes and squash.
In the hoop house, Mac was active sowing more seeds of dozens of items. Sue was all but swallowed up a by the gourds. She reported that we are seeing some melon fly damage now and the beginnings of mildew. She took steps to control the mildew with a copper spray (an organic approved method). We will be putting out fly traps and bait stations to help control their numbers. Carl used the mower and created mulch by mowing the grasses and weeds. The clippings make excellent mulch! All the volunteers kept themselves busy all morning.
Harvest today consisted of green snap beans, onions, swiss chard, kale, and mustard greens.
Over the weekend we had the opportunity to help some Ka'u residents by giving away more food: kohlrabi, chard, snap beans, potatoes, and our first cabbage.
June 25th
We are most of the way thru June already and we are seeing a lot more things coming out of the garden. Harvests are now seeing the addition of three types of chard, another type of kohlrabi, broccoli, round head cabbage, round sweet onions plus thick non-bulbing spring onions up to two inches thick! The herbs are all coming in strong: summer savoy, true greek oregano, cilantro, parsley, salad burnet, cutting celery, sweet marjoram, chives, garlic chives, dill, sage, and rosemary. In the potato department we are getting not just whites (tan skins, red skin, purple skin, and pink skin), but also pink fleshed and dark purple fleshed. A real rainbow of potatoes!
What surprises us is that we are getting requests for vegetables now. People are looking for various odd kales and assorted greens, particular herbs, and other vegetables. We will try growing them all and keep you informed how our efforts go. But we also find that certain veggies we already have are in strong demand, especially onions (both bulb and spring type), greens, radishes, daikon, peas, beans, etc. If we wanted this effort to be a business, we surely would have little trouble selling our produce. But our focus is on producing food to help others in need, so a lot of what we grow will not be sold.
Problems in Paradise...... not all is rosy in the garden. We are seeing our share of pests. Whitefly has been especially bad, affecting some beds but not others. Slugs are a constant battle. Pickleworm requires vigilant attention. But now we have moved to the next horrible pest....fruit fly! The melon flies how found our garden. Egads! So this week we are learning how to control this problem pest. This one looks like will be much harder to control, but we shall see.
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