Harvest Home

 If you follow my FaceBook page, you have read a lot of references this past growing season to the "50 sqft Farm."  We rented a 5x10-foot plot at a community garden about a mile from our house. It provided sunshine that our lovely shaded yard just cannot muster.  We planted our first crop--radishes--in mid-April. We harvested our last crop on garden closing day Nov. 12. One of the community projects was making signs--this was ours. 

 Wayside is a completely organic garden, and everyone is encouraged to grow plants from seed and to try heirloom vegetables. We started these cherry tomato plants and some sweet banana pepper plants at home. Grandma Alice Linville's milk pan provided a convenient vessel to keep the seedlings together while they hardened on our porch in the cold rainy days we had in May. 

 Our first harvest was of radishes. These were picked on May 18. There were three rows so we had radishes for almost a month in the cool rainy weather.  As the radishes came out, we sowed rows of beets. We had put out onion sets when the radishes went in. Toward the end of April we had also set out kohlrabi and chard plants purchased at from our favorite local farm market. 

 By the third week in May, we harvested our first kohlrabi bulb, and also found lots of chard. We liked the kohlrabi, a relative of cabbage, raw in salads and I also sliced some and cooked it as a layer in veggie-cheese pizza. The chard made delicious greens and also worked instead of spinach in quesadillas and in a different veggie-cheese pizza. 

 Wayside Garden also plants a "row for the hungry" to grow food to be donated to a local food pantry. We volunteered to help with this part of the mission and on a cold wet May day we mudded in 10 heirloom tomato seedlings grown by a friend. By June 17 they were sturdy and growing strong. This plot was alongside the main "row" and we took responsibility for watering and tending it all season long. In the drought and 100-degree weather of July and August Norm hauled 10 one-gallon jugs of water every other day to keep the plants alive. They survived and yielded many pounds of tomatoes for clients of the food pantry at Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

 On June 23 Wayside held a Summer Solstice celebration, an evening open house, potluck dessert and soft rock concert at the garden. Norm notes how far the tomatoes and beans in our little plot have managed to grow, while proudly wearing his Wayside T-shirt.  By this time the kohlrabi and most onions were done. We were still getting some beets. We had started a zucchini, an cucumber and a yellow squash. All of those would eventually catch wilt and die, but nothing fazed the swiss chard. By this time we had also put the banana pepper plants in on the other side of the beans and tomatoes, and we had added a patch of celery plants just because a pack of them called my name at the farm market one day.

 For some reason I thought it would be good to plant blue lake pole beans in a circle around the tomato cages for our Jet Star and cherry tomato plants. At this point in June, they were still all getting along. Eventually the beans won the race to the top, which cut into tomato production...they got too much shade, although that wasn't all bad during the heat wave. 

 One of our most colorful harvests: July 24. We had been traveling for two weeks in July in Tennessee and Kentucky, and this greeted us when we got home: the last of the beets, first of the banana peppers, first tomatoes, some lovely onions and one whopping zucchini that was very tender. It was to be our only zucchini--the vine died a week later. 

In this picture the zucchini plant still looks healthy, but its days are numbered. Meanwhile, the beans and tomatoes are fighting it out and the plant stakes are at risk. Norm found some metal stakes later in August that he used to stabilize the cages so they wouldn't fall over. We did get many pounds of marvelous green beans from these vines that we shared with friends, donated to the food pantry, and ate ourselves several times a week. I can recommend pole blue lakes highly. They are productive and easy to pick. We plan to grow them next year, but on their own supports, to give the tomatoes a break.

We have requested a second plot for next year--it is next to this one and this year one of the garden leaders tried growing peanuts on it. So there should be lots of nitrogen fixed in the soil. Earlier this month we cleared our plot, brought home the stakes, cages and sign, and assessed what did well that we want to grow again. Definitely radishes, beets, onions, chard, and pole beans. We want to add some carrots and parsnips in the mix, and maybe some spinach and a row of snap peas. Kohlrabi was fun, but celery didn't pan out, although we didn't read the growing instructions until late in the game. We did harvest a lot of stalks and leaves that were good in soup and salads. We may skip squash and cucumbers entirely unless we can learn of a natural way to control the bugs that spread the wilt disease. We may try a different tomato variety. The Jet Stars we put in our home garden in the perennial bed did better than the Jet Starts at the farm. We don't know if it was the beans, or something else. Our plot has been put to bed with a layer of manure and a layer of mulch, waiting for opening day in March or April when it can be tilled and we can start over again. Somehow, the "100 sqft Farm" doesn't sound quite as catchy as a name, but we will be happy to give it a try. Eating food that we grew ourselves, even if only part of the time and over part of the year, was a true blessing in 2011.