The Above Ground

We were all pleased to see how much our garden has taken off in the past few days—even the very little rain that we’ve gotten in the past week has done wonders! Eggplant, cantalope, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, leeks, and different spices are just some of the amazing food we have growing! Each time we come back to weed/water, it’s like just a touch of magic happened overnight—buds have turned into food—and LOTS of it!

We were also growing watermelon—which was growing fantastically! We were all excited after Monday’s visit to come back and harvest the watermelon (and eat them! :D), but when we came back to the garden on Wednesday, we noticed the watermelon patch had been raided, and all we had left were two small watermelons that were no where near ready to pick.

Although we were disappointed (and we noticed with no small amount of laughter that our multitudes of eggplants hadn’t been touched!) we were glad that somebody out there was going to be eating quality food—hopefully with their family and friends. Is there any other way to eat freshly picked summer watermelon?

Our garden has had a hard time with aphids lately—especially on our leefy greens (aphids apparently enjoy leefy greens the most out of all of the variety of garden foods they could choose from). If you look really closely on that bottom picture of the leefy green plant, you can see weird greyish looking lumpy stuff on it (and you can clearly see the holes in the leaves). That is what aphids look like.

Several plants in our garden were too infested to do anything about the aphid problem, but others (the ones that the youth up there are looking at), were salvageable. So, in the tradition of great gardeners and farmers since the beginning of time, we gathered tomato leaves off our tomato plants, and then steeped them in water, like you would  tea. We steeped ours for two days. Then we drained the leaves out of the water, and diluted the water a bit with more water. We put the mixture into a squeeze bottle and then got to work spraying the mixture all over the aphids!

Tomatoes, for those who don’t know, are from a group of plants that many animals and bugs either find poisonous or just offensive smelling.

We’ll be back in the garden in a few days to see how the aphids liked the tomato spray—we hope they hated it! :D

We were up at the garden again this Wednesday, this time learning about some of the fundamentals of garden, including the role of worms in composting and how tomato plants can help control aphids in the garden!

This particular series of photos focuses on vermicompost—or worms that help create compost by eating old food, leaves, hay, etc and then pooping it all out into delicious (for the ground) fertilizer! The top picture has the anatomy of various worms, and then the bottom pictures show the bin that our worms are in (notice the drain off underneath—you can gather that drain off and add it to your garden for yummy (albeit slightly gross) nutrients!).

Notice how dark and beautiful the compost is? What you do after it gets that glorious texture is then sift the worms out of the mixture (we did not get to see how that process was done today!) and then basically integrate that in with your garden soil.