My Virginia Garden Late May 2012

Square-Foot Raised Beds, May 27, 2012, Southeastern VA

My raised beds are doing better than I ever dreamed. If you want to see what I have planted where, my online garden planner has more details. The asparagus is coming up beautifully, and the beds are coming alive and green with vegetation.

Asparagus Bed

 The beds are mostly vegetables but I interspersed flowers to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects. I've put some flowering potted plants near the beds for the same reason. I've already started to harvest some Cherry Belle radishes, both the greens for salads and the roots themselves. The Romaine lettuce is ready for some selective picking of their outer leaves. I've mulched most plants, except the lettuces, since mulch attracts slugs. Most plants have been mulched with a mix of chicken manure, vegetable scraps, straw, and other items from my Compostumbler, but some of the squares of asparagus with white clover. The clover is an experiment. I suspect it is a bad idea, especially since it is the first year for the asparagus. I read in an article that researchers tried this and the asparagus produced thinner spears than the control plants and reduced yields:

 Unsuppressed white Dutch clover established

at asparagus planting controlled weeds and provided
N over time to the asparagus in a Wisconsin
study, but reduced yield significantly. Establishing
the clover in the second year or third year of an
asparagus planting would be more effective.

Experimental asparagus with clover as living mulch

Unfortunately, I sowed the clover with the asparagus in the first year. Everything I've read suggests that Dutch White Clover is a good idea under tomatoes and pole beans, although it does compete with the taller plants for water. Water has been plentiful so far this year so I will allow the experiment to continue. ***Update or 7/18/12: The asparagus has grown in so thick, it has smothered most of the clover for lack of light. I suspect this is just as well. The clover adds nitrogen to the soil, and if it's dead, it can't compete with the asparagus for water in the summer heat we are having. I was afraid the clover would take over my vegetable beds, but it never did.

I read somewhere a recommendation of sowing winter peas and oats in late September over cleaned asparagus beds as a winter cover crop. The Sustainable Agriculture Network recommends winter rye for the same purpose in its free publication, "Managing Cover Crops Profitably."

Squash Bed

Something, either slugs or caterpillars, has been munching heavily on my radish tops. I plan to try some beer traps in case it is the former. The radishes may be acting as a trap crop, however, because whatever the pest is, it has been mostly leaving my young spinach and lettuces alone. I'd much prefer to lose radish greens than the other salad greens. I also tried spraying a little Neem oil on the radishes and on the few lettuces that are seeing damage.

Romaine lettuce

Basil with leaf mulch

Basil with compost

Baby spinach

We have lot of trees on our property. This has both its good and bad points. The main bad point is that we accidentally located the garden in a spot that does not get enough sunlight for fruiting crops such as tomatoes. To give ourselves credit, there are so many trees it is hard to find a truly sunny spot. Don plans to trim trees and limbs to improve the sunlight. He can't do it fast enough for me!


The "up" side to having so many limbs is that they produce lots of leaves. Our oak tree also sheds flowers in the spring (and tons of acorns for the squirrels). Yes, the leaves are a plus! We continually shake our heads at neighbors who bag them up and leave them at the curb.

We have a terrific lawnmower. We can either use it as a mulching mower, and mulch DRY leaves and oak flowers into the soil, or we can use the bagger that comes with the mower to shred the leaves to use as mulch. Right now most of my garden is mulched with compost  or leaves or a combination of both.


Two words of warning: be sure the leaves are brown (dry). Be sure compost is well-aged. Squash and potatoes, however, will grow more easily in less-than-optimal compost than other plants.

So far I love pole beans! This is the first year I've ever grown them, and I love how quickly they grow up the teepee-style trellises I have put up for them. But I wouldn't have planted them so close to the tomatoes if I'd realized how little sunlight my gardens would get. Oh, well.

Tomato, Pepper, and Pole Bean Bed

  Note to self: I have GOT to pay more attention to my garden planner. I originally planned to grow two tomatillos. I think I read they pollinate and produce better that way. I had two growing beautifully. Wouldn't you know it, I pulled one up? Aargh! At least I'll have more room for squash, since I am growing more than I originally planned in the same space. The square-foot method isn't well suited to squashes, melons, etc., although you can try growing them vertically, which is what I plan to do.

I will post some pictures of my flowers planted for biodiversity and attracting pollinators below. Some double as edibles or herbs.

Nasturtiums are spicy and edible

Marigolds are welcome in any garden

Forget Me Nots

Potted Thyme and Cilantro Flowering

Asparagus Rising

I spent late afternoon and early evening today planting vegetable seeds around the asparagus in two of my raised beds. Check out Mother Earth News' garden planner for the layout and for details of what I put where in my square foot gardens.

 I started some seeds indoors in peat pellets over a month ago, but for the first time I've been disappointed with the results. Many seeds never sprouted at all. And many of the seedlings died, even the hardy marigolds, and what is left won't be ready to plant outside for several more weeks.

It was so depressing I had to head outside to spend some quality time with my sage plants to cheer myself up. The sage, transplanted from my former home in North Carolina, is adjusting well and blooming beautifully:

 I'm not sure what went wrong with the peat pellets. In past years I have overwatered, causing fungus to grow on my seedlings. In an effort to avoid that, I may have underwatered my plants this year. Some of the seed may have been too old or gotten a little moist in storage somehow. I just don't know.

 On a more positive note, the asparagus I planted is doing great so far. The spears look so good, I have to remind myself they are off-limits for harvesting the first year. Check them out:

Mary Washington and Jersey Supreme Asparagus

Most of the purple passion is coming up more slowly, but it's coming:

Purple Passion

I have tried sowing some inoculated Dutch white clover around 8 squares of asparagus. I am hoping it will act as a ground cover and living mulch for the asparagus while it improves the soil with its nitrogen-fixing properties. I am torn between the fact that asparagus is a heavy feeder and the fact that it doesn't compete well with weeds. Then again, clover is great for feeding pollinators and attracting beneficials to the garden. So I decided to risk it with 8 squares, keeping the clover confined to the squares. I'll see how the clover-squares do vs. the bare squares and figure it out from there.

Update for May 1: I bought some dill, chives, leeks, and sweet pepper plants at Southern States this week, hardened them off a little, and transplanted them into some of the squares. I prefer to grow my own plants from seed because I worry about diseases unwittingly brought home with plants mass-produced for big box stores. But the few seedlings I have are small and iffy, and I just can' wait. I decided to skip the peas I was going to grow. Summers warm up around here so quickly, and peas are a cool-season plant. I will plant them for the fall or I will plant them late next January now that I have beds and soil in place.

The GOOD news is that most of the plants that seem to be surviving are varieties of tomatoes. They are small but most look like they'll live. HURRAY, tomatoes! I can almost taste them.

The "Little Tomato That Could" got roughed up, somehow, when Don brought it into the house to protect it from last week's cold weather. Sadly, some of its stems were broken. But it's still alive and it's still producing flowers and tomatoes. I spread some Solu-Lime around it and fertilized it with some diluted compost tea. I am already starting to worry about blossom end rot, which in my experience is more common and harder to treat in potted tomatoes. When the weather gets hot and dry, it is hard to maintain the consistent moisture that tomatoes need when they are confined in pots.

The asparagus is looking great, and the "purple passion" is catching up to the other strains in terms of size. We have been eating all the asparagus and strawberries we can handle from our CSA. It is so delicious, we can't wait to eat asparagus from our own back yard. Just two more years!


***Update for 5/23/12: I had to pull up my first "female" asparagus plant today. It was one of the purple passion plants. The standard advice is to pull up any plants that start to produce berries. These are female plants. The reason is that over time, they are less productive than the males, and the berries produce baby asparagus plants. The babies grow all over the place, like weeds, and have to be weeded by hand. If you let them grow, half of the babies are female, compounding the problem. This is one reason why the Jersey hybrids are more productive: they are mostly male. The upside to pulling up the "mama" plant was that there was a smaller spear growing up from the crown, so Don and I had a taste of our own asparagus before I tossed the plant in our compost pile. Purple Passion is definitely sweet and tender! We ate it raw.


***Update or 7/18/12: The asparagus has grown in so thick, it has smothered most of the clover for lack of light. I suspect this is just as well. The clover adds nitrogen to the soil, and if it's dead, it can't compete with the asparagus for water in the summer heat we are having. I was afraid the clover would take over my vegetable beds, but it never did.

Planting Asparagus

Purple Passion

Tonight I am physically tired. My 30 asparagus crowns, long awaited from R.H.Shumway's Seed Company, arrived yesterday, so today I finished amending the soil in our raised beds and planted them. I had ordered them from Shumway's because the price was good. They seemed to arrive in healthy condition; time will tell. I ordered ten crowns each of Jersey Supreme, Mary Washington, and Purple Passion. I ordered Jersey because it's a mostly-male top producer, Mary Washington because I have a soft spot for heritage crops, and Purple Passion because of its reputation for outstanding sweetness and flavor. Plus it's purple until you cook it, and I like color and variety.

As you can see from the picture, the asparagus crowns are cute-ugly in a "Cousin It" from the old "Munsters" t.v.-show kind of way.

Cousin It from "The Munsters"

Shumway's planting directions came wrapped up inside with the crowns. Since I didn't see directions right away, I went look online for directions on how to plant them. Most websites recommended digging a trench and filling it in, either slowly over time or all at once. Asparagusgardener.com had pretty typical directions. But I was using raised beds and a Square Foot Gardening technique, and Don had already measured my beds out into one-foot squares, so I decided not to use trenches and just spread each crown's roots out the best I could in a hole in each square. I hope the asparagus crowns will manage to figure out where their roots go for themselves. Here is a picture of the garden, now surrounded by a fence to keep our dogs out, with the vegetable beds half-filled and the asparagus beds filled in:

The ladder is to climb over the fence. Don put it up in a hurry and still needs to put a gate in it and tighten up the fencing. So I've had to climb up and over the fence using the stepladder all day as I went to work. It was great extra exercise if a little slippery in today's drizzle.

No wonder I'm tired!

The asparagus website said asparagus needs a high PH, around 7.0. I had put compost in the beds and planned to put in even more when I planted the crowns, so without actually measuring the PH of the beds I decided to add some lime. I reasoned that since compost and organic matter lower PH, I should counter the other amendments with something that raises it.

So I amended the top few inches of the beds with some cow manure, some "Nature's Helper" composted manure with forest products, and some Solu-Lime from Southern States. And, yes, I had to haul all this over the fence! I also mixed a little organic bone meal into each hole as I planted the asparagus crowns. This might seem like a lot of work, but the asparagus, once it starts producing in the third year, should keep producing for 15-20 years. It's a heavy feeder, healthy plants in good soil theoretically need less pest control, and we want these beds to get off to a good start.

 If the squirrels don't get it first. My neighbor, Nam, predicts the squirrels in our backyard will wreak havoc on our new garden. This is quite possible. And the way we've fenced it off to keep the dogs out will actually protect the squirrels and encourage the little critters. Don boasts about being a good shot, but he's not a killer at heart, I'm a vegetarian, there are laws against firing guns in the city, and the squirrels will just learn to wait to raid the garden when we're not around . They're smart.

What will we do to squirrel-proof our hard work? I guess that's fodder for other posts when we've had time to figure it out. If you'd like to see what I hope the finished beds will grow, visit Mother Earth News' Garden Planner.

     
**Update on 1/18/14: The squirrels haven't bothered the asparagus. We has some problems with asparagus beetles and asparagus beetle larvae last season. Our answer was to hand-pick as many of the critters as we could and hand-feed them to our chickens. It was time-consuming, but the chickens loved it and are much tamer than they used to be! Last season we picked asparagus for about two weeks, but this season we should be able to pick a lot more. I can hardly wait!