The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul. — Alfred Austin Our demo garden is in its glory! What beauty! The children’s therapeutic group even picked its first tomato and zucchini! A lot of work gets done by many hands. If you enjoy reading our newsletter and have not visited the garden, please join us on a Tuesday morning. As vacation time approaches, we are in desperate need of more volunteers. We are always happy to see new faces! Enjoy looking at our hat pictures! On July 19th, we will have our T-Shirt day. Wear your favorite T-Shirt or a special t- shirt. Lets see what we all come up with! Garden Reports: Shade Garden: Rained out last week, but I’m adding a few pictures from today. We love you our “Shady Crew” Compost Central: Larry Himelfarb Another hot and muggy day at the "office." The team today was Ephraim, Marlowe and Larry and due to the heat and the heat of the piles, we did not turn all the bins, though three out of four was enough. The food waste and garden waste bins still registered 130 degrees and both of these we turned and watered. The garden waste bin was energized with more greens from the garden. All of the food waste and coffee grounds that were added last week had disappeared. Marlowe turned the County's Geo bin that has food waste and coffee grounds as its nitrogen source and the biota inside was still on the job--120 degrees. We need to sit down with the data, but we suspect that the use of food scraps and coffee grounds creates very warm piles and this process generates finished compost in about 8 weeks. Perhaps it is a little faster than just using yard waste. We track the inputs, temperatures (core and ambient) and decomposition status on a spreadsheet every week. Children's Garden: Susan Kirby Yesterday was not the perfect day to weed or cut back perennials, but that is what the Children's Garden needed. The area around Peter Rabbit's garden had gotten weedy, and so that is where the focus was. The vegetable beds yielded up another batch of beets and carrots, and a huge "small" cabbage was harvested as well. The cabbage looked remarkably good for not having been covered to protect it from munching caterpillar friends-Peter is a lazy gardener. A friend or two of Peter appeared to have dropped by and made a snack of the parsley, too Butterfly Garden: Peggy Stanford Today was humid and hot. The garden continues to flourish. The Common Milkweed and Monarda are spectacular. There is also the mystery plant (see photo) which catches your eye as you pass through the garden. Julie and I were joined today by Ilene (2014 MG). We planted a pink Penstemon, Gaura, and zinnias in our expanded area. Julie started to remove the invasive yellow iris. We spotted Swallowtail larvae on the spice bush (see Darlene’s photo)and a Yellow Swallowtail passed through the garden. Herb and Fragrance: Kathy Tsai Weeding was the order of the day in the Herb and Fragrance garden. Canada thistle was removed along the back fence line and common purslane was rampant in the brick walkway and beds. If only everything grew as easily and abundantly as these weeds! Some dead-heading was done to the two Knockout roses to give them a cleaner appearance. The African blue basils and heliotrope are growing well, and should soon fill out the center flower bed; their companion Chocolate-scented daisies are just now getting flower buds. Some of the Russian sage was cut back again to allow more sun to reach the nicotiana plants. A hummingbird was spotted visiting the bee balm, but no butterflies on the butterfly weed, which is blooming heavily. Maybe next week. Aphids were found on the nasturtiums and will get a dose of insecticidal soap a little later in the week. Conservation Garden: Maria Wortman Nothing too exciting to report from the Conservation Garden this week. All our new groundcovers are settling in nicely. We still have plenty of spots for more. If you happen to have any spare (hopefully native) ground covers please let us know. We are especially interested in ferns, such as the evergreen native, the Christmas Fern. The native Spigelia Marylandica, a.k.a. Indian Pink, brightens up the shady corners of our garden with its brilliant red blossoms with yellow throats. We highly recommend it. Our hydrangeas also bring brightness and color to the garden. We particularly love one specimen that has a mophead of many tiny, lovely pink blossoms. We’re trying to I.D. it and would appreciate your help. Our best guess is ‘Invincibelle Spirit’. If you have a positive I.D. for it, please let us know. (see photo below) A couple of frogs were spotted in the pond! (We get excited about such things J) Therapeutic Horticulture Beds: Bob Loesche In the parallel bed, the Lavender continues to put on a beautiful show, and the Coneflowers and Marigolds are in full bloom. The abundant Yarrow plants are knock your socks off; white is the primary color, but yellow, pink and (my personal favorite) red are also present. In the third bed, the one perpendicular to the other two, the red Gomphrena is just days away from flowering, and our single hardy blue specimen appears to not be far behind. The Feverfew, Shasta Daisies, and two beds of Zinnias are flowering gloriously, and the Anise Hyssop now is doing so as well. The Fennel is a huge, feathery green cloud. The Dianthus and Salvia are a little small but flowering robustly. Therapeutic Children’s Garden: Sandy Occhipinti There was a lot to harvest in the garden this week, including both green and yellow bush beans, two large zucchini, oregano, basil, Swiss chard and lettuce. The sugar snap peas on the trellis by the bench are still amazingly productive despite weekly threats to pull them up as the temperature heats up. The beets were harvested and another row of bush beans was planted. One row of red onions was harvested as scallions to give the adjacent row more space to grow. We also harvested our first Sungold tomato! Small Fruit: Patty Osseroff This week we continued to weed around the paw paws and planted the buckwheat cover crop. The female russian kiwi got a trellis and we harvested a lot of rhubarb. Everything is growing well, we'll need to do some major pruning to the goji berry and the currants. Tomato Bed - Dan Ward/Joslyn Read The tomatoes continue their growth, along with the suckers. Most plants now have fruits in various stages of development. The cherry tomatoes will probably be the first to ripen. We haven't seen any problems with fungal infections or other biological problems. Although there was one plant that had a minor infection of Septoria a few weeks ago it has not reappeared. The biggest ailment we have is a few plants exhibiting leaf curl. This is likely the result of inconsistent watering, i.e., unpredictable thunderstorms dumping very heavy, but short lived, rain. Because the rain doesn't have the chance to soak into the ground we did a heavy watering. Joe is also helping by installing new drip irrigation lines. To help with water retention we also put a layer of leaf mulch around the plants. Because of the growth, and the setting of fruit, we have been tying the stems to the posts and twine to get them to grow straighter. We are continuing the pruning to help with air circulation and keeping the lower vines from reaching the ground. That is a pathway for bad critters and diseases. 100 Square Foot Garden: Mary Anne Normile On a hot and muggy day, we worked on troubleshooting problems in the small garden. A couple of cucumber and pepper plants were a sickly looking, pale green. We consulted with Dr. Erica, who prescribed a good dose of fertilizer. Fish emulsion was applied for a quick, organic boost. On the positive side, more beans have germinated with--fingers crossed--no sign of rabbit incursion. Growing tomatoes were tied to the trellis and suckered. As always, summer weeds were tamed, a few had gotten quite large as they masqueraded as surrounding plants. We harvested two types of kale, mustard (which had finally bolted), lots of onions, and pretty chioggia beets. We planted more beans, Bull's blood beets, summer lettuce (two varieties described as being "summer" or heat tolerant), Swiss chard, and cucumbers, and thinned the abundant summer squash plants, sharing extras with other parts of the garden. Edibles: Erica Smith Summer is slow to come this year - not in the temperature and humidity, which were pretty staggering this week, but in the progress of our summer crops, most of which went in late and are not close to producing yet. But we are still harvesting spring crops, including various kinds of kale, some lettuce, and peas. I am giving the Red Acre cabbage another week to form heads. Cucurbits like squash, cucumbers, and especially melons are growing slowly, but we should have some squash to harvest soon. We planted more squash seedlings this week (thanks to leftovers from the 100SFG) and more are coming along to be transplanted. Beans are not quite ready to harvest, but they'll be producing soon. Take a look at the scarlet runner beans behind the tomatoes - beautiful flowers, which may result in some beans if the weather is not too hot for them. A new crop of bush beans is emerging where the cabbages came out. A lot of the work this week was weeding - we can always use help with that, along with mulching (which will help keep the weeds down) and harvesting. Next week we'll harvest the garlic and clean up that bed, transplanting some of the cress plants to the salad table, where I planted more lettuce this week. I found a few squash bug eggs on zucchini leaves, so let's watch out for those in coming weeks. MANNA: Robin Ritterhoff We delivered 60 pounds today of onions, cabbages, beets, carrots, chard, kale, lettuce, herbs, the last of the sugar snap peas, and the first cucumber (from a compact variety in the keyhole bed). That brings our YTD total to 362 pounds. Keyhole: Robin Ritterhoff Our focus today was on tending the bed, making sure that the compact cucumbers don’t smother the chard and beets, and guiding the compact tomato branches into their support structures. We were disappointed only to see that two of the 15 or so pre-soaked beans we planted June 21 had sprouted. Is the un-irrigated bed too dry to nurture seeds, even soaked ones? We’ll give it more time before panicking! Bales: Robin Ritterhoff None of the pre-soaked beans we planted in the bales came up, either. But we could console ourselves that everything else in the bales is growing strongly, especially the tomatoes, which seem to have taken off with last week’s rains. Bug Report: Darlene Nicholson Hope that Tuesday's 10 @ 10 session about bug ID was helpful. One thing to keep in mind is that at Derwood we do have all the beneficials that we saw and more. Eagle-eyed Peggy alerted me to a Spice Bush Caterpillar early instar that she found on the Spicebush plant in the butterfly garden. In the first photo, in order to photograph it, I gently unrolled the leaf shelter the caterpillar had rolled itself in. The second image of it shows a different view and a silk mat it put down to aid in getting the rolled leaf to stick together. We gently rolled it back up and it's good to go. We counted three leaf shelters on that Spicebush. The other bug of interest noted Tuesday was a leafhopper. The Broad-Headed Sharpshooter (Oncometopia orbona) feeds by sucking plant sap from trees and shrubs. Their most unappealing trait is that they are known to vector plant diseases as they can quickly hop from plant to plant. Their numbers are few in our garden and are mostly too quick to catch, so they are in that "neutral" category. They are interesting to photograph, as they keep their eyes on you and play a game of going from atop the leave to the underside and vice versa in rapid succession. This last image of a bug...wait...what? Isn't that a flower? I actually took this photograph for the flower image (Nicotiana) but upon processing it, noticed something with legs deep inside. I couldn't enlarge it enough to identify it, but maybe it was responsible for the damage on the flower? (Hint, it's black and in the upper right hand corner of the flower’s center). Pond Report : Darlene Nicholson
Both ponds are doing very well, algae is at a minimum, fish are doing swimmingly, and we spotted a small frog at each pond on Tuesday. Still shy, they hopped away quickly and didn't pose for pictures. Closing Comments: Lily and Bill Thank you Darlene for the very successful 10 at 10 on bugs. A lot of prep time and hands on learning! What fun! Next week, Susan E. will be talking about Garlic! Our garlic should be ready to pick by next week, so it will be a timely talk. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes. Tom fixing our fences, Joe making sure irrigation is working, and mowing our lawn, our leads ordering, planning, starting seedlings so we have something to plant, our amazing plant labelers, signs that will be going up around the veggie area.... Thank you all for keeping our garden going! Please start collecting and bring your oyster shell containers. We will be using them to give out our tomatoes to MANNA. We hope we will have at least a few ready by next week. We need to start getting our beautiful garden ready for our Grow It Eat It event on August 6th. Please come join us, many hands make light work! See you all next Tuesday!
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AuthorOur weekly reports are a joint effort of all garden leads
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