Gardening requires lots of water- most of it in the form of perspiration- Lou Erickson Many hands makes light work” .Thank you for hearing our plea of help. We were delighted to see you in the garden. With a hot and humid morning, it was nice to be able to finish on time and accomplish lots. Many thanks to Susan Eisendrath for our 10 at 10 on garlic. It was inspiring and delicious Garden Reports: Shade Garden: Carol Martin Thursday June 30 As Lily's pictures of last Thursday showed, we were hard at work in the Shade garden on a glorious early summer day. Temps & humidity were perfect & our small crew, reduced by summer travel & other activities, namely "life",, carried on. The work on the hillside is precarious & rewarding, but the guys were able to unearth yet a few more huge rocks for a proposed border. We are so lucky that one of our crew is taking Steve's Landscape construction class this summer -- good timing for the work at hand. Sue Schick, co-leader, presented a draft of "interpretive" sign language as introduction/overview of garden. In the hear of July we want to do a full inventory of plants & have new signage produced. Compost Central: Denny May Larry Himelfarb and Denny May turned the two active piles in the compost area today, one a food waste pile and one garden waste pile. Both had temperatures in the 130 degree range. The other five piles are dormant and in the final stages of decomposition. Susan Eisendrath aerated our closed container and turned the two county Geo Bins. As of next week, we will probably have seven compost piles finished off and/or in the final stage. Gardeners wanting compost right now can access some in bin 6, the last large wooden bin on the left as you face the bins. That compost is finished but still needs screening. We anticipate very little active composting for the next month to six weeks, at which time we will take the existing garden leftovers and put them in beds to break down over the winter. Great season so far: the food waste has proven to be a fast composting process, with the garden waste compost not too far behind. Children's Garden Report: Susan Kirby It was gratifying to see the effects of beneficial rain on the Children's Garden--and it was very pleasant not to have to water this week. The small vegetable garden continues to produce cabbage and carrots, and soon the beans and Tiny Tim Tomatoes will be bearing. That is, if Peter Rabbit's friends don't find their way to the beds. Weeding continued to be essential after the rains, and the cardinal vines on the teepee needed to be thinned. There were a number of lanky perennials that needed to be cut back in hopes of producing a second flush of bloom. The Monarda didyma and the Popcorn plant (Senna) are in bloom. A group of young people came by to check out things (they appeared to be middle high age). They seemed to be quite familiar with the garden and were interested in how things were growing. Therapeutic Horticulture Beds: Patty Neame The beds were well watered with the storm this week and there are lots of flowers. The Zinnias are plentiful and there were no old flowers to be deadheaded this week. The Dianthus is getting lost next to the row of Zinnias and need more sun so the Zinnias will need to be tied back. Lilliput Zinnias have small flowers as promised. The Larkspur will be pulled next week as the seeds have started to disperse and the Celosia below need more sun to thrive. The Nigella plants are finishing will be pulled next week as well. The Artemisia was trimmed so you can walk around the end of the bed. The Ageratum is just beginning to get blue flowers. The Yarrow is plentiful and the colors great. The red Gomphrena is flowering but not very bushy. The red Salvia is at its peak. The Shasta Daisies flowers may need to be cut so that the plants will produce more flowers. The bees love the purple flowers on the Anise Hyssop. Small Fennel plants were removed from the pathways. Conservation Garden: Maria Wortman We pulled out some small remnants of the invasive yellow flag iris at the pond area. Hope they’re all gone now! Did general clean-up and weeding. Weeding! It’s such a bother. We are continuing to try to lessen the task by mulching with leaves and planting desirable plants that will fill in and prevent weeds from developing. We planted a row of donated variegated sedges along the back fence line. When they fill in, we hope our job of weeding the fence line will be eliminated! If you happen to have a spare Christmas Fern or epimediums lying around, we’d love to have them. Note from Bill and Lily : Do not plant any of the yellow flag iris in your garden. It is in the invasive plant list... Butterfly Garden: Peggy Stanford Today was a very humid day in the Butterfly Garden. We were joined by Ada who trimmed the overgrowth along the back fence. Thanks Ada we enjoyed your company. We continued to add attractors to our new space. As a matter of fact, it looks just about complete for the season. New plants include Black-eyed Susan, blue salvia, and Delphinium. We saw a Fritillary and Yellow Swallowtail today. Herb Garden: Kathy Tsai The war on weeds continued this week in the Herb and Fragrance garden. The brick walkway's weeds were given a "haircut," meaning they were sliced off flush with the bricks rather than being dug out. It was a quick way to keep them in check although certainly not as thorough a job. It was just too hot and humid to do a better job of it today. Some cutting back of plants was done to allow others to get more sun and better air circulation. The anise hyssop was cut back to allow more sun to get to the heirloom rose, the jasmine cut back a bit to keep it from being too unruly, and the black-eyed susans were thinned out to allow the butterfly weed to flourish. The nasturtiums in the containers were given a good spraying of insecticidal soap which have been attacked by aphids. Several of the mints in the "mint vault" had become rather leggy and so were trimmed back. Some of the russian sage and thyme plants were cut back to reveal the stevia plant. Last but not least, we had our first blooms on this year's chocolate-scented daisies. Edibles: Erica Smith So nice to see lots of friends and get lots of work done today in the garden! We thought we'd get washed out, or have low attendance due to the holiday, but instead the skies were clear and the gardeners were active. I am so much less tired this week even though it was hot! Some of the veggies we harvested today: garlic, beans, lettuce, carrots, beets, peppers, a very few more peas (but the plants are done). Next week we should have our first squash, and some more greens (maybe those Red Acre cabbages will finally be ready). We caught up on labeling (thanks LeeAnne!) and put in some new squash and cucumber seedlings to fill in spaces and replace plants that haven't done well. Some spicy cress plants from the garlic bed were transplanted to the salad table (and some left in the bed to keep growing). They are hot but tasty - feel free to snack. Aside from that there was a lot of weeding (and the weeds will be happier yet with all that rain). In the next couple of weeks we'll want to get more wood chips and mulch on the paths and beds, and clear out unwelcome plant invaders - let's have the garden looking as nice for the August 6 GIEI event as we can. MANNA: Robin Ritterhoff Our harvest delivered to Manna today was 44 pounds of the most beautiful carrots, beets, onions, a couple of large zucchinis, some cucumbers, herbs and greens, plus the tail end of the snap peas. Our year-to-date total now stands at 406 pounds. KEYHOLE: Robin Ritterhoff Our keyhole bed is doing well, requiring little care, and giving us a nice chard harvest today. While most plants there are thriving, only one bush bean seedling remains of the three we spotted last week (the only ones that emerged from the 20 or so presoaked beans we planted two weeks ago). The remaining seedling had been munched a bit, and a torn off leaf had been left behind from one of the two that disappeared. Plus Sandy spotted a suspicious perfectly round little hole leading down into the bed, maybe vole-sized. What else might climb up to eat our bean seedlings in such a high raised bed? (Ideas welcome!) And a couple of our compact cucumbers appear to have succumbed to bacterial wilt carried by the cucumber beetles that have eluded our capture over past three weeks. BALES: Robin Ritterhoff We are really delighted with the results of Joslyn’s excellent suggestion & guidance (plus her husband’s contribution of his skill & power tools) to find & reuse pallets cut to size as little walls supporting the bales. It looks so much neater and the pallets hold the bales together so well that passers-by can scarcely tell how much the bales have subsided as they continue to turn into compost. We're adding straw where we can. Our tomato plants are really taking off, with many green tomatoes promising a bounty of ripe ones in a few weeks. Our ‘Black Krim’ plant had a couple of cat-faced tomatoes, caused by the plant’s exposure to cold, and a couple showing signs of what might be developing blossom-end rot, reflecting a nutritional deficiency that we’ll attempt to correct with the application of some liquid fertilizer. Small Fruit: Barbara Bryden The Paw Paw patch was again the focus of this week. More weeding was done, the clover was left in ground to help fix nitrogen. The ground was roughed up slightly to accommodate the addition of buckwheat seeds. A tablespoon of Azomite was mixed with water in the Watering Can and sprinkled around the Paw Paw trees. The trees are looking well, there was a really soaking rain the night before so extensive watering wasn’t necessary. Note from Lily: Barbara was the only mg (intern) working on small fruits due to the holiday. Thanks for your hard work Barbara! 100 Square Foot Garden: Linda Taveira- dasilva July showed up all her hot and muggy self in the garden. The animals are still on vacation and the bugs got lost (a sabotaged GPS app). Our bush and pole beans are busy growing. The summer lettuce and Swiss chard , beets, zucchini and squash have all germinated. The basil, kale, collards, chives, and oregano all lined up for hefty haircuts. We had a ton (or half) of big purple carrots and a few good -size Bull's blood beets for Manna. Our salad cucumber bush, who knows how to keep her own space, is blooming and we had our first cucumber party. The vining cukes look less pucky this week and they look as they may actually grow after all. The tomatoes and tomatillo plants look a little pregnant with flowers and tiny tomatoes and the peppers are having pepper babies! As for the vanity side of the garden (the circle) our cosmos flowers are reaching the teen years, getting big and sassy and the pansies are still looking good in their old age. Container Garden: Claude Allen and Carol Olsen The Container Garden is coming along nicely with lots of tomatoes, peppers, and other veggies rapidly moving towards maturity. We'll probably harvest some in the next week. Additionally, the radishes and some of the herbs (dill, marjoram, and Mexican tarragon) are flowering. I think we should let some go to seed and replace some with other vegetables. We are open to suggestions on what we should plant next. A healthy clump of grass masquerading as chives was removed. Suckers and yellowing leaves were removed from the tomatoes and stakes added to better support these plants. The basil plants were pinched back to promote growth. Several handfuls of mint and chives were harvested for Manna. It was also decided to harvest the radishes. Two were nice and plump while the others were on the medium to thin side. Did you know that the seed pods, which look like sugar snap peas, are edible? They are crunchy and have a mellower taste than the radish. You can eat them raw, add them to tossed salads, stir fry or sauté them. We have received another beautiful pot for the Container Garden. I recommend we do a combination of vegetables and flowers (marigolds, nasturtiums, or other edibles) for the new container. I will update the signage as we change out plants in the containers and try to find a better way to attach the signage to the post. It seems to wander off when we are not in the garden. Ponds: Darlene Nicholson Both ponds are doing well. I am including two pond plants that are currently blooming. The first is Pickerel Rush and the second is Spike Rush. Bug Report : Darlene Nicholson Please be on the lookout for the Squash bug (below) and Squash bug eggs. We are seeing some throughout the garden, so keep an eye open for them and have your soapy water bucket ready! The eggs are usually found in clusters on the underside of leaves. Below is an image of a Robber Fly I saw the other day. The University of Kentucky Entomology Department reports that, "Larval and adult Robber flies are predators of other insects. The adults are famous for their ability to capture prey in the air. In fact, Robber flies will often catch insects that are larger than themselves." Closing Comments: Lily and Bill
Thanks all again for being part of this wonderful garden. We have already donated over 400 pounds of food for MANNA while having fun, teaching and learning in a beautiful location! What more could we want! Appreciate all the volunteers this week even though it was a hot and muggy morning. We are in the process of surveying interns from this year and last year about their experience in Derwood demo garden. If you have any comments/suggestions on your experience as a volunteer here –please send us an email- we would welcome any input you may have. We want this to be a positive experience for everyone and we will work to improve in any way we can. Please note that T- Shirt week will not be next week, but the following week- on the 19th. On the 19th, we will also have Sue K. visit with her “Growing Forward” kids. Please be ready to share something about your garden with our little visitors. Please save oyster shell containers so we can deliver tomatoes to MANNA Our 10 at 10 will be on butterfly garden by Peggy and Bobbie... Donna Soskin is storing Linda Davis soil test kit. If you’re interested in using it, you can contact Donna . Thanks everyone! Have a wonderful week!
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