It needs to warm up outside!

Alright mother nature... it is time to warm up! I need to get these transplants out of my house! Most of them have totally over grown their containers and are competing for sunlight. I ordered a garden diary a few days ago so that I can start to keep track of my trial & error learning situations like, don't start tomatoes quite so early lol. My tomatoes are all about 8"-10" tall, and need to get outside. Jody & I are still waiting on our soil delivery and it's been too nasty out to put them outside anyways, so next year I won't start them quite so early. I also started some melons inside and they are like Jack and the Beanstalk! They are growing all these little tendrils that are trying to grab onto everything around them. I am really really hoping that this week the weather will shape up and we can get all these plants in the ground!

Peppers are looking pretty good. These were supposed to be started 8 weeks
before the last frost, and they were, so they haven't gotten too big yet.
Unlike my tomatoes, which were supposed to be started 6 weeks
before and I started them 8. Woops...

This pretty leaf belongs to one of my ground cherries.
I am super excited to try these!

Only the strong survive

For the last week or two I have been trying to improve the growing conditions in my living room "greenhouse". My tomatoes have developed edema with varying degrees of severity. For some of the tomatoes, like Chalks Early Jewel or Gold Medal, it has caused slight wilting or dropping of leaves, but the plants are still doing well. For others, like Gold Rush, it completely wiped out ALL my transplants. I feel really happy that I over planted on accident, so now even with the loss of some of my transplants, I can still have plenty left over.

So, what is edema?

University of Minnesota Extension has an excellent article on this topic. In short:

"Oedema, often spelled 'edema', is a physiological disorder that develops when a plant absorbs water faster than it can be lost normally from leaf surfaces. The term itself means 'swelling', which describes its initial stages. Excess moisture builds up in the plant and causes swellings that appear initially as pale-green or water-soaked blisters or bumps, primarily on the undersides of leaves. Although oedema mars the beauty of plants it rarely kills them."

Here are pictures of my effected tomatoes:

I ended up scrapping 5 tomatoes today because they were dropping all of their leaves. The leaves were coming off whole branches at a time, like in the pictures. If I looked closely at the stems, there were tiny cankers on them as well. I am trying to find a watering situation that will help improve this situation and I have also set up a small fan to help with air flow around the plants. Ideally, I would be able to give them all some more space so they weren't so crowded, but I just don't have any where else to put them! If they can just make it a few more weeks it will be warm enough to get them outside, and then I think this problem will take care of itself.

Garden Design

We've been making some good progress on our garden! I love that Katie has been able to start so many seedlings! And I've gotten our design

Here is the design: 

Seed Setup

Here are some pictures of my transplants that I got started around March 25th.

Tomatoes

Peppers just started sprouting

Stupice Tomatoes have a "Potato Leaf" See how it's round rather than ridged?

Green Tomatillo

My set up:
Lamps are clipped onto the piles of books so that they will look straight down on the seedlings. All light bulbs are compact fluorescents that don't put off heat. Two are daylight balanced and one is tungsten. I am going out today to buy one more clamp light because 3 is not quite enough. I have to keep rotating the "dark spot" so everything grows evenly.

Crop List

Here is a list of what we will be growing this year:

Peppers

• Aurora
• Garden Sunshine
• Aji Crystal
• Buran
• Fish
• Chervena Chushka
• Tequila Sunrise
• Candlelight

Tomatoes

• Red Fig
• Chalk's Early Jewel
• Sheboygan
• Hartman's Gooseberry
• Black Plum
• Green Tomatillo
• Riesentraube
• Gold Medal
• Stupice
• Gold Rush Currant
• Austin's Red Pear

Melons

• Charantais
• Delice De Table
• Jenny Lind
• Healy's Pride
• Collective Farm Woman
• Minnesota Midget
• Bidwell Casaba
• Sakata's Sweet
• Early Silverline
• Noir des Carmines

Beans & Peas

• Sieva Lima Bean
• Red Swan Snap Bean
• Fin De Bagnol String Bean
• Bountiful Bush Bean
• Dragon's Tongue Wax Bean
• British Wonder Pea
• Sutton's Harbinger Pea

Ground Cherry- Aunt Molly's Eggplant- Rossa Bianca Lettuce Mix Herbs

• Cilantro
• Chives
• Basil
• Tarragon

Green & Yellow zucchini Acorn & Butternut Squash Beets- Cylindra Cucumbers

• Boothby's Blonde
• Poona Kheera

Swiss Chard- Five Color Silverbeet Carrots- Paris Market Prairie Flowers- For edging, unused space, soil improvement, and to attract beneficial insects

• Purple Prairie Clover
• Big Bluestem
• Lavender Hyssop
• Black Eyed Susan
• Sunflower mix
• Wildflower mix
• Purple Coneflower

Sheet Mulching

Since our soil has high levels of lead in it, I’m concerned about growing in the soil at all until it’s been amended.  My permaculture background brings me to sheet mulching as the answer to our lead problem.  The problem is that I’ve don’t have much experience with it; I did an installation once but never found out the results of our efforts.  So I started to research.  

I’m relying upon Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture as my guide in this endeavor.  There are many other sources including these:Try No Dig Gardening for Your Backyard Vegetables and Oh, the Joy and Wonder of Sheet Mulching.  However, Toby has taken broken the process down a couple different ways and included dimensions that make it very easy to duplicate.  I’ve come up with a modified version of the keyholes for that I will be posting another entry about the garden design.       

The recommendation is to use 4-6 layers of different types of compostable organic matter, creating a bed no larger than 200 sq. ft. that is 2-4 ft. deep.  The ground should be wet before starting.  Here’s a list of layers:

• 1^st Layer – High Nitrogen Layer (worm compost, manure, etc.)
• 2^nd Layer – Cardboard/Newspaper – dampen before moving on
• 3^rd Layer – Another High Nitrogen Layer (manure, fresh grass clippings)
• 4^th Layer – Bulk Mulch (8”-12” of loose straw or hay) – Should be damp but not wet
• 5^th Layer – Compost (1”-2”)
• 6^th Layer – Weed- and Seed-free Organic Matter (2” of straw, fine bark, or wood shavings)

All of these don’t have to be utilized, “sheet mulch can be as simple as a layer of newspapers topped by eight to twelve inches of nearly any mulch material” (Hemenway pg. 88) however this is the optimum plan.

I’m not certain how many of these layers we are going to end up installing; however we have a couple already taken care of.  I fortuitously picked up some very large sheets of cardboard from a colleague last week which are going to be using for the 2^nd layer, what that doesn’t cover we have newspapers. We need to get the bulk mulch and figure out something to use for the high nitrogen (N) layer.  I have some worm compost which could be used for the N layer but I doubt there’s enough to cover the entire area so we might have to consider getting some fresh manure for this task.  We have some connections for bulk mulch but need to confirm where we are getting it from.

Dump truck dropping off compost

Compost spread out

According to Toby Hemenway, “if you plan to plant the sheet mulch within a few weeks, a layer of compost will be necessary to act as a seedbed” (pg. 89).  Luckily back in October we had a truck load of compost delivered to the site and we leveled it out to about 2’-0” deep, it’s currently 4”-6” of compost; which will be perfect for us to use for the 5^th Layer. 

Compost after winter

Finally, we need secure the weed- and seed-free organic matter.  The fact that its weed- and seed-free is important otherwise the garden will be overrun with weeds, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid with this layer.  When we are ready to plant in May, Toby recommends pushing “this layer aside to reach the compost/soil layer right below” (pg. 89). 

Hemenway, Toby. (2009). Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (2^nd Edition). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company   

The Beginning

About a year ago I met with Katie and Sylvia to discuss the possibility of starting this community garden.  I had gotten the idea when I was taking my Permaculture Design Certification course and we visited the Chicago Honey Co-op.  In addition to a vast apiary, there was an extensive garden growing on top of the concrete!  This garden became my inspiration, if we could harvest sweet potatoes out of a heap of compost the size of a canoe on concrete it could be done anywhere. 

So there were a lot of logistics that we needed to work out.  Sylvia helped bring my lofty ideas down to reality.  From there we all started to put together a proposal, again Sylvia and Katie were vital to this process.  I believe that I just put my thoughts into writing and they are the reason why we are about to begin sheet-mulching soon.  

After our initial meeting (I don’t know the sequence of events exact but this is a general synopsis), we contacted the alderman and found out that we should attend their monthly open community meetings. All wards have them; just call the alderman’s office.  I also found out that the alderman requested that we apply for the NeighborSpace garden.  

Katie and I completed this application over a couple months; we had realized that we were planning for this year so we were in no rush. I had gone to one aldermanic meeting and received tentative approval to move forward.   It took some prodding (I tried to make it as easy as possible; I emailed a draft of the letter in a Word document to them which allowed them to just make the modification they needed.) but we got the approval from the alderman and they sent their letter directly to NeighborSpace.  We haven’t heard back anything from NeighborSpace just yet but we are still moving forward.  The main thing we need help with is to get access to use the fire hydrant across the street.  

After we got our approval, we got some compost delivered to get the process started.  We leveled it out to about 2’ deep.  Katie planted some bulbs and brought some straw over to the property.  I’ll let Katie write her experiences in her blog: Chicago Style Garden.  Then we let winter come…and it has snowed like never before!  In retrospect, I think we should have done some earthworking to collect all that snow water…but please excuse me permaculturists.  I’m learning as I go and this is a lesson I have learned.  

The challenges as I am currently designing the space are that the property is completely flat, its lead levels are a little too high, and there is no water on site.  I’m going to have separate entries for the sheet mulching plan/research and another for the design.