Sweet Potato blossoms

These sweet potato vines were rooted at my After-School gardening classes last Winter, and transplanted this summer at a restaurant sidewalk planter.  Today I noticed that they're flowering.

I'm not sure if sweet potatoes bloom based on variety or conditions.  I don't recall any of mine blooming before, and most that we see do not have flowers.  Sweet potatoes mostly reproduce asexually (as we created these very clones from a tuber), so the flowers are less necessary.  They're close relations to morning glories, which do indeed need to flower for their species survival. 

The flowers resemble tobacco and petunias, but those are in the nightshade family, while sweet potatoes are in the convolvulaceae family.  

Pole beans and trellises

By mid-August, bean season has officially begun.  We did have some earlier bush bean harvests, as those are quicker to produce.  Pole (or runner) beans, in contrast, take a few months to get going.  Most of these were planted mid-May to mid-June, starting slow, then spreading out as vines, and now are producing lots of beans.   Below are shown a few different trellising methods.

Sorghum plant

I have a few bean vines climbing sorghum plants.  It's a big success in this photo, but the weight of the plants and pods, has felled some other sorghum plants.  This is still worth trying with sorghum, sunflowers, and corn if done sparingly (as they are similar to sorghum but a bit more delicate).

 






To the right are some scarlet runner beans on a normal, wooden stake and twine trellis.  I planted bean and cucumber seeds the recommended 3 or 4 inches apart, and this is a good example of how full they will grow when doing well.  Next year I may finally learn and keep the plants 6" or more apart.  It is possible to over-plant beans and jeopardize the yield by overcrowding.



These purple podded pole beans are growing against a fence at a school garden.  This type of wrought iron fence is a bit too slippery and wide for beans to latch on to, so it's necessary to add some type of trellis netting or twine, as I have done.  With such assistance, the beans will engulf the fence.




  
Below are some more pole beans that are trellising on chain-linked fences, which seem to do just fine.

Larger scale gardening

In late July, while very busy with all of my freelance gardening work, I stumbled upon a very cool larger scale gardening job.

I was hired by a Brooklyn-based food pantry, to run their existing gardens, assist with their education programs, and oversee the building of two very large gardens.  One is a 7,000 square foot garden in a nearby vacant lot, and the other is a 20,000 "mini-farm" in the Rockaways.

I'll create some postings showing the step-by-step construction.  Given that we started the project pretty late in the growing season, I'll also have a lot to post about Fall plantings.  For now, just a quick overview.

Earlier this Spring, a smaller garden was created in the large vacant lot in Bed-Stuy, as a collaboration between my employer and a nearby school.  It consisted of around a dozen 4' x 16' wooden raised bed planters.  The problem was that this left a lot of unused space.  The space actually wasn't just unused, but it took a great effort to keep the lot from just filling up with weeds.

Our goal was to turn most of the space into a vegetable garden.  Rather than create dozens of more wooden raised beds, we instead just added rows of soil and paths, as would be in a farm.  We're also constructing a small greenhouse, soon a three bin composting system, and then some teaching, cooking and other gathering areas. 

This space will be used both as a school garden, and a production garden for the food pantry.  We may even have enough produce to support a small farmer's market.  

soil delivery

The project in the Rockaways is around three times large in scale.  Here, we'll also grow dozens of rows.  Plus, we'll have a larger composting operation, a chicken coup/run, and a dedicated area for a farm stand and some educational activities.  The growing areas will also have a hoop house or another type of construction that will give us some four season farm space. 

This farm will grow produce for some other local food banks, sell at our own farmers market, and maybe sell produce to some local restaurants.

What's growing and being harvested...

July was a busy month keeping up with watering during some heatwaves.  For the most part, everything survived.  Here are some photos taken in July and early August...

Chard

Ground Cherry

Lacinato Kale

Cabbage

Tomatoes

Succession planting, round two...

I haven't kept up with writing about all the gardening activities, as it's been too busy...for obvious reasons.

To backtrack from earlier posts about garden planning, here's some examples of how to get an earlier season in the garden.

The long planter in the front had arugula, spinach and radishes

Succession planting 

All of the arugula, spinach and radishes have been harvested since early June.  In some of my gardens, we filled this real estate with nightshades and companions.  What used to have those early crops, now have tomatoes (or eggplants, peppers, tomatillos or ground cherries), with basil inter-planted, and carrots seeded in between all plants.  Soon the plants will fill in and we'll forget that we had those prior crops.

Closer look at the eggplants

Now the same planter has ground cherries,
tomatoes and eggplants

Ground cherries, basil and carrots

In one of my gardens, the arugula has been replaced with pole beans, cucumbers and squash.  This area will turn from a simple horizontal garden, to a nice vertical planting.

Arugula before an early harvest

Same area with a trellis, after all arugula was harvested

 Another good way to utilize space is to inter-plant radishes with chard or beets (same species).  In a future posting, I'll show some before and after photos.

Early harvests at the restaurant, and squirrels

Arugula and mizuno

The first two harvests at the restaurant where a lot smaller than they should have been, but for a squirrel (or few) that kept digging up some of my newly seeded planters.  I kept sprinkling blood meal, hoping that would deter the pests, but no such luck.  So, better late then never, I finally added bird netting  Bird netting isn't perfect against squirrels, but it just makes it enough of a hassle, and thus does protect most of the plants.

Going forward, I hope to lose a smaller percentage of the crop to squirrels, so we should be able to harvest larger quantities.  

I harvested a lot of arugula, plus some spinach, lettuce, mizuno, chard, beet greens, bok choy, and also some pea greens.  All will be mixed in with the purchased salad greens and fed to the restaurant's customers.

1st harvest from a few weeks ago

2nd harvest from last Thursday

Lettuce

More from a school garden

This Spring has seen a phenomenal radish harvest.  In the past, many of our radishes have been small or have bolted before producing a good root, but this year there's been a huge success rate, plus some beet-sized radishes.  I believe the weather conditions are to credit, not the seeds. 

Most other Spring crops are ready.  We'll soon be harvesting arugula, spinach, lettuce, and also some baby kale.  Below is some kale and chard that were planted in early April.  After six weeks since being sowed, the kale can be thinned out with "baby kale" harvested, leaving fewer plants to continue.  The chard, to the left of the kale, is showing it's true form, but still very small.

All in all, it looks like our early planting was a huge success.  If we harvested all the short-season crops today, and then started the later plantings, we would be pretty much aligned with most gardeners that don't start thinking about their garden until mid-May.  There's not much risk in delaying the later planting, by sowing some frost-tolerant crops in March..  Also, from the photo to the right, it appears that our chard and kale plants, that were direct sown are surely just as mature as most plant starts that later gardeners tend to buy.