Winterizing an urban garden

Autumn work on the farm and autumn in the city are so very different, yet vaguely similar. Here's a few things I found in common -- sort of. I also wrote a poem about how I'm feeling about this autumn.


Water

Empty herb bed and missing rain barrel.

On the farm, getting water to garden and animals was literally a matter of life or death for flora and fauna. We had hoses stretched out to barns and gardens from spring through autumn. But as temperatures threatened a sustained freezing or below, we drained hoses and stored them in the barn to prevent bursting over winter.

In the city, we cleaned out the rain barrels, reinstalled the downspouts and drained 25 feet of hose.

Newly installed rain barrel (and lots of bed-making material)

Garden beds
My dad spent autumn days harvesting corn and prepping fields for the crop the following spring. My brothers and I helped clean out the garden, heap dead plant material on the compost pile and cover the beds with mulch. With the exception of scale, this is largely what Jay and I did on one of the last nice weekends of the autumn. We cleaned out our community garden bed, and at home, harvested all our herbs, ripped out the annual flowers, chopped down the perennial vegetation such as lilly, iris and hosta leaves. The leaves and stems of the very prolific wave petunias would have overwhelmed even my ambitious home composting system, so we had to take them to the county compost site. The farm equivalent would have been to drive the tractor to a field and left them to compost on their own.

Wave petunias mid-season.
They grew much wavier and wildly colorful by late summer.

All that remains is the dusty miller and leaf mulch to protect the soil

Leaves
During my 13 years on the farm, five years of college and 10 years of renting, "raking leaves" meant nothing to me. They blew around the yard, off into the fields and effectively disappeared. Then I bought a house, and then I moved to Jay's house, both of which had enough tree action that the leaves couldn't be ignored.

Composting leaves seems like a good idea, but they are voluminous. Last year my neighbor Randy told me that he was done raking and he was just going to mow over the leaves where they lay. "Good for the soil and good for my back," he told me. We took it a step further. We gathered all the leaves on our front sidewalk and mowed over them, back and forth, until they were leaflets. This year we got smarter and simply gathered leaves in the back yard and ground them up on the dirt. We filled two plastic garbage cans and spread the rest on the flower beds to protect the soil over the winter. The leaves in the bins will be our compost "brown" to match whatever "green" we add to our compost bins from the kitchen.

Our autumn compost bin prep includes two plastic garbage cans with tight lids full of  shredded leaves.  As "green" garden waste is dumped into the wire bin on the left, we'll add an equal amount of leaf material to keep the green/brown mixture roughly even. The wire bin at right is the summer's yard and kitchen waste newly chopped up under our mower and mixed with new leaves and dirt. It will be nicely composted by next spring.

Sticks
Trees don't just drop leaves, they drop sticks. Lots of them. I don't remember picking up sticks on the farm, but I seem to have to bend over like a duck pecking at the grass every time we mow. We store them next to the house and a couple times a year put them out on the curb. We do this in the autumn at great peril of it snowing before the city lawn and garden department comes through our neighborhood.

Sticks waiting to be picked up - before the first snow PLEASE!

Winterize

On the farm, we worked hard to winterize the house and buildings with animals. This meant staging plenty of hay for feeding and straw for bedding. In the early days, it meant putting hay bales around the exterior of the house to stop wind from blowing through the foundation. We also put away tools and machinery and moved animals to winter quarters.

In the city, we put our lawn furniture under a tarp. Not terribly romantic :) How do YOU prepare, both physically and mentally, for winter?

Autumn in the city

I'm no poet, but the idea that follows came to me today as I moped around the lawn.

The rain barrels are dry,
The annuals are pulled,
The garlic is in,
The hostas are gone,
The leaves are raked,
The hose is rolled,
The gutters are clear,
The lawn is clipped,
The sticks are picked,
The mower is stored,

And I, I, I am bored.

Video of community garden clean up

I created a video of the garden clean up day. The content is self-explanatory. Except for Uncle Max. 

I decided to amend our beds this autumn and let the soil mature over winter. My co-worker not only offered aged horse manure, but also to bag and deliver it to work! My neighbor burns wood and gave me a bag of ash. And we planned to top the beds off with compost from a huge pile at work.

After cleaning out plant material and removing this summer's hay mulch, I started to spread a light layer of ash across the beds.
As I sprinkled the ash Jay said, "There goes Uncle Max." One of the weeding parties was within earshot and my friend LeeAnn looked up and remarked, "Uncle Max? Should't we say a prayer or something?" Oh my did we have a giggle at that, and after playing it up a bit, we fessed up that the ash came from a tree.

Not to let another opportunity go, as we started to spread out the horse manure, Jay said, "There goes Bessie." By now we were verging on sacrilege, and LeeAnn played along and asked, "Bessie?"
Thanks Jay and LeeAnn for the laughs, you can see the smiles on our faces, they didn't go away for quite some time.

The following is a small version of the video, but due to text in the video, it's best watched on YouTube.

Clean-up day builds community and compost

Everything we do in the American Family Community Garden seems to be a first. First planting, first weeds, first compost pile, first rabbit damage, first Japanese beetles. Autumn isn't without its firsts either: first frost, first person to decide not to garden next year, and first time to clean the garden beds and community areas. (lots of photos below)

While gardeners were welcome to clean out their personal plots at any time, we planned three community clean-up days when we could work at the same time, get to know one another, and do some community work together. Several people from our small garden committee volunteered to organize work parties during the second community cleanup day, Saturday, Oct. 29. We had three main things to do: weed the common paths, move a compost pile, and winterize the rain barrels. In my opinion, there was an even bigger task to do, start building community among a rather disparate group of gardeners.

Jay and I arrived around 8:45 a.m., and there were already people digging weeds out of the paths. Our thin layer of mulch was no match for the surrounding weed pressure, and at first, the weeding task was ominous. I had previously joked with my fellow committee members that I was going to sneak out to the garden at night and spray the weeds with Roundup.

However, as the morning sun rose, more people arrived and before I knew it there were people in different parts of the garden weeding and carting compost. Jay and I had more than three things to do to get our plot ready for winter and next spring: restake the bed boards; clean out the old plant materials, amend the bed with ash and horse manure, fill any remaining space with compost, and plant the garlic.

Jay pulling marigolds and me pulling tomato cages.

While Jay and I worked on the bed, I looked up once in awhile to see the weeding crews moving down the paths, the compost pile getting smaller and the picnic table get loaded up with snacks. Eventually I started to get self-conscious that we hadn’t yet put effort into the community work, so Jay and I left our project, grabbed spades and joined a weeding party in the fruit tree area.


We chatted with people and dug out the thistles and other weeds that had crept in from the field around our garden. We talked about our successes and challenges of the summer, remarked on the absolutely splendid day we had for working outdoors, proposed various ways to ensure the weeds aren’t as much of a problem next year and got to know one another better.


My cousin Tracy arrived with her small sons. She works at a General Electric plant in Madison, and is helping expand a community garden there, so she wanted to see what our garden was all about. Fortunately, the two women who spearheaded our community garden efforts were both working in the garden and I introduced them to Tracy so they could talk shop. I knew it was a successful introduction when I saw them exchange business cards.


I am pleased and delighted with the number of people who came to help in the garden. At one point, I counted 14 people, though I think the total number was higher because people came and went all morning and into the afternoon. I attempted to say hello to every person and to thank them for helping as they departed.


When one of my coworkers departed, I said something like “It was nice to have you here,” to which he replied (in jest, I need to add), “Why? Because I was doing something moderately social?” Fair enough, you wouldn’t call this particular fellow “Mr. Social,” but no, the reason I was glad to have him, and all the other gardeners there on a Saturday morning, was because they contributed to one half of the formula that makes up a community garden. The gardening for the year was done, but we were all there for the community. Very very cool.

Lessons learned from this summer’s community garden plot

1. Brussel sprouts are pigs. Well, they aren’t actually pigs or Jay would achieve his dream of harvesting bacon from the garden. But for what they provide (those little cabbage nuggets of goodness), they take a long, long time to grow and take up a lot of space.  I could get more out of the small plot with other vegetables. I’m thinking garlic and onions. 

   

   Eight brussel sprout plants took up A LOT of room in my 10x10 garden plot.

2. Garlic planted in the spring yields, but not much. I was warned that garlic planted in the spring would not yield much, but I’m happy with what I got for an early June planting. I can’t wait to see what October planted garlic produces!

   

   Garlic planted in late spring yeild small but tasty crowns. For 2012, I'm planting in late October 2011.

3. It’s ok to trim back an indeterminate cherry tomato plant. We planted one sungold cherry tomato plant which took up half a garden bed alongside our garage. It produced like crazy, and in October, it was still blossoming flowers. Had I trimmed it back, we would have gotten more fruit off less plant.

   

   Yes Virginia, that's ONE sun-gold cherry tomato plant.

4. Indeterminite tomato plants are not good for canning. Well, they are and we did. But we didn’t get a lot of ripe fruit at any one time. Next year, one indeterminate slicing tomato, and several determinate beefy and paste plants.

   

   We made marinara sauce with whatever was on the vine at the time.

5. Careful when co-planting. I read that nasturtium plants ward off a disease (or insect, can’t recall) from eggplant. So I planted several among my eggplant. The nasturtium grew faster and I think competed with and did little to help the eggplant. In August I tore them out and if I’m not mistaken, it seemed that that’s when the eggplant really started to thrive. It was too late for those blossoms to turn into anything but compost.

   

   Nasturtium flowers - tasty but aggressive

6. Give the Malabar more trellis. My friend Diane shared two of these viny spinach plants. I tastes great, nothing seemed to kill it, lasted all summer and into autumn and gave the nasturtium next to it a run for its money. We are definitely planting this one next year. But it needs a bigger trellis and we need to more aggressively nibble at its succulent leaves.
7. Buy vs. start. I’m still 50/50 on this one; because I haven’t done the math, I don’t know if it’s more cost-effective to buy and start seeds under grow lights or purchase plants from the farmer’s market, etc. I spent $10 on seed packets for basil, eggplant and some flowers. But that doesn’t include electricity spent on lights and heat mats. I spent $50 at the farmer’s market for the rest of what I put in the garden. The thing about starting from seed is I have all these leftover seeds, and I have to buy many packets to get the variety I want. I think the key is to plant what I need lots of (basil, eggplant) and buy what I want a few of. OR, I’d like to get into a seed starting cooperative, i.e. I start the basil for everyone, someone else starts tomatoes, etc., or I just get people to pay me for plants I start? Oh boy, that sounds like trouble.

   

   Nothing says "spring" like loose soil and seeds under grow lights.

8. I love to be in the garden at 6 in the morning. It’s quiet and peaceful. Sometimes it’s foggy and a little mysterious. I have the whole place to myself, yet I’m sharing it with lots of other people. The day is just starting, and I have time to prune, pick or care for the plants. The hawk watches me, the chipmunk, me, the rabbit, me, the ground squirrel, me, the mouse, me, the mole and then me as I drive off to start my day.

   

   An early morning sunrise casts long shadows on the sleepy community garden.

9. If the world goes to hell, we could provide for ourselves. If an economic, social or military apocalypse happened, I’d scrape together some seeds and move to my parents' farm in western Wisconsin where Jay and I, along with my family, could grow and preserve our own food. Variety would be slim and we’d have to be thoughtful about getting a balanced diet (what is high in vitamin C that grows at our latitude?). But I learned that I could do it.
10. Top 10 lists need 10 entries. Letterman’s 10^th item is usually the ringer, the gotcha, the really good one. Mine? Mine is the obvious – I learned that I have much to learn. Why did every single Japanese truffle tomato split on top and get this black stuff in the splits? I don’t know, but I’m not going to plant them again.  Why weren’t my eggplant prolific? I don’t know, but I’m going to try again. Why oh why did I not stick to my “plant cilantro every other week all summer” plan, again? I don’t know, but I’ll make an effort again next year. And so on. Perhaps this is why people garden up until they are dead, because there is much to learn, but despite not knowing much, at least I got a few tomatoes.

A garden and a CSA box

“You have a garden and a CSA box?” I get that question a lot.

I have subscribed to a community-supported agriculture (CSA) box of vegetables for more than five years. While I’ve been dabbling in herbs for years, only recently did I start a vegetable garden. Because my garden is small and I have limited free time, I only plant what I want lots of: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil and brussel sprouts.

On the other hand, we get a wide variety of vegetables with our CSA box from Tipi Produce. For those who don’t know what a CSA is, here’s a brief CSA primer. A CSA entails buying, or subscribing to, a local farmer for a box of vegetables every or every other week. CSA farms have various lengths of growing seasons (ours has one of the longest at 26 weeks). Some provide vegetables only, some have fruit add-ons, and others add honey, mushrooms and even meat to their boxes.

Jay and I share a box with another couple and we split a new box of vegetables every Thursday from early May through mid-November. The box in spring has lots of leafy vegetables and, as the season and plants mature, we get your typical radishes, beans and peas. Later in the season we’ll find heartier corn, potatoes and squash in our box.

But among these typical vegetables, we also get garlic scapes, arugula, Italian frying peppers, Jerusalem artichokes and celerac. Don’t know what some of these are? Neither did we. Which is precisely why despite growing a productive garden, we intend to continue subscribing to our CSA. I grow the few things I want lots of, and we never quite know what vegetable surprise we’ll find in our next box. Thanks Tipi Produce for another great year of veggies.

What if gardening lengthened summer and shortened winter?

In February of this year, I got out my seed starting equipment; flats with clear plastic lids, heat mats, and built a temporary table in the basement and then hung grow lights over it. In March, I started several flats of seeds; basil, eggplant and some flowers.

A few weeks later, I came home from a greenhouse with flower seeds to direct sow in the ground. I spent much of April planning both how to build beds in our 10x10 foot community garden plot, and got through May planning where to put plants in dirt.

On June 3 our community garden plot was open for planting, and Jay and I loaded our car with pots, plants and planks to start our community garden. With the late start, June and July were all about water and growth. I started harvesting peppers, eggplant and tomatoes in August. 

Production slowed with a cool September, but I been steadily harvested tomatoes and peppers and a few more eggplant. We gained two more weeks of ripening by covering the plants, twice, to protect from frost. But with October’s shortened days and unpredictably frosty nights, it’s time to strip the peppers and green tomatoes and wait for a hard frost to sweeten the brussel sprouts.

There’s still garden work to do. Later in October Jay and I will clean out the garden, loosen the soil with a pitch fork and add horse manure and compost to fill in the settled beds. Then we’ll stake out two rows with string and plant nearly a pound of garlic (three varieties) which equates to somewhere around 30+ cloves. Finally, we’ll spread out a light layer of hay to protect the soil.

As I was grieving the end of the gardening season, I realized that this year, the gardening season was a full nine months long, significantly lengthening what I usually think of as a three-month summer of June to August.

Our garden provided planning, anticipation, birth, growth, harvest, preserving and completion. It provided great joy, a learning experience and an abundance of food for us and a local food pantry. I got to know more of my co-workers by gardening with them. And looking ahead, Jay and I will eat the fruits of our labor (salsa, baba ganoush, pesto and marinara sauce).

As the garden goes to sleeps, we’ll enjoy autumn leaves, carve pumpkins for Halloween, gather with family for Thanksgiving. Before you know it, we’ll move right into Christmas. The New Year will be upon us and I’ll have to trudge my way through the long, dark month of January. And in February, I’ll get out those seed flats and lights. Maybe winter isn’t as long as I used to dread it to be.