Harvesting Dill!

Fresh Homegrown Dill

It's that time of year again.  Time to harvest the dill.  Dill is one of my favorite flavors of summer!   All parts can be used for cooking or making dill pickles.  It's easy to cut the whole plant and put it headfirst into a paper sack and let it dry with the sack open.   Check out this post about dill that I wrote a few years ago.

5 Ways To Save Money In The Vegetable Garden

vegetable garden in Salt Lake City

Vegetable gardening has some costs.  There are things you need to buy in order to experience the magic of growing your own food.  Hopefully you will harvest enough food from the garden to offset the monetary inputs.  Most certainly, you will reap the immeasurable benefits of joy and satisfaction when you sit down to a plate of food that came from the garden you nurtured.

Here are 5 ways you can save money in your vegetable garden:

1 - plant things from seeds when you can.  Plants are relatively expensive and seeds will produce plants at a fraction of the cost.
2 - be efficient with water.  Drip systems are perfect for the vegetable garden.
3 - be efficient with the harvest.  Money and time (and your blood, sweat and tears) have gone into this garden.  What a terrible waste if you don't utilize the fruits of the harvest.  If there is too much for you and your family, share it with friends and neighbors.  Or do some canning and preserving.  Your local food pantry will welcome any fresh produce you have to offer.
4 - compost.  Make your own compost to feed the soil and plants in your garden.  It's much cheaper than buying it.
5 - go organic.  Use organic methods to feed your soil and plants and to control pests and weeds.  Pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers and plant foods are expensive and can damage your soil in the long run.

Harvesting Parsnips

It's a good thing we weren't counting on parsnips for Christmas dinner!  I forgot to harvest them!  So,  I went to the community garden last week to see if I could find them.  The garden was fast asleep under a blanket of snow.  I brushed off of the place in my plot where the parsnips were supposed to be.  When I dug them up, I was disappointed at how small the were.  However, they tasted great, roasted with other root vegetables.  This year I will try parsnips again, but I think I have too many wood chips in the soil still.   I will add a lot of compost and manure in the early spring to break them down.  I hope this will help.

The Historic Sandy Community Garden In Winter

Historic Sandy Community Garden in January 2013

Digging Parsnips in Winter - I Got One!

Parsnip Harvest, January 2013

Blossom End Rot

My friend Alison, who gardens in Bountiful, Utah, sent me a picture of her tomatoes that have blossom end rot.

This is a common problem for tomatoes and sometimes peppers and cucumbers and melons.  At the Sandy garden we are  finding blossom end rot on green bell peppers.   It is not actually a disease but a physiological issue caused by problems with calcium absorption.  There are several factors that can interfere with calcium absorption:
- fluctuation in soil moisture
- excess nitrogen in soil
- root damage from cultivation
- extreems in soil pH
- cold soil
- soil high in salts
I think that the first one - fluctuation in soil moisture - is the likely cause of blossom end rot this season. It has been very hot, windy and dry.  These weather conditions make it difficult to keep moisture in the soil.
The Solution:  Now that plants are bigger and are fruiting, they need to be watered more deeply.  A drip system or soaker hose can get water down to the root zone - 12 or 18 inches under the surface!  If you are hand watering, then you can dig a shallow trench around the base of each plant (not right next to the main stem, but out a few inches) and fill it with water 3 - 5 times to make sure the water is soaking in near the plants and not just sprinkling the surface or running off.  Or try some plant nannies.
*Caution:  When your tomatoes start to ripen, watch for splitting.  Splitting happens when they get too much water.  Keep watering deeply, but not as often.

Pumpkin Patch Progress

The pumpkin patch at the community garden is coming along nicely.  It has enjoyed the heat and I noticed that some plants are flowering.  The windy days a few weeks ago killed some plants - just broke them right off.  The good news is, I have seen very few squash bugs.  Robins and other birds like to hang out in the pumpkin patch and I'm hoping they will eat any squash bugs that might show up.  We have two surviving plants of "Dill's Atlantic Giant" on one side of the garden.  Those are the huge pumpkins that people grow for contests. They can get as big as volkswagens!  We will give them extra water and see how they do.

Pumpkin Patch Early June

Pumpkin Patch Late June

Pumpkin Patch July 8

July Fireworks! Dill Flowers!

The dill is flowering at the community garden!  When it starts to go to seed in a few weeks,  it will be ready to harvest for dill pickles.

Dill Flowers 

Dill Flowers

The Pumpkin Patch is Growing!

Speaking of squashes, the pumpkin patch at the Historic Sandy Community Garden is growing!  On May 25, we planted it with a variety of edible squashes and pumpkins.  If all goes well, we will sell them at the annual Pumpkin Fest on September 22.  Here are some pictures of the progress so far:

Planting Day - May 25

June 18

June 26

Is It Necessary To Plants Squashes and Melons in Mounds or Hills?

My friend asked me why we are supposed to plant squashes and melons in mounds.  The answer is - it is not necessary here in Utah unless we are planting in clay soil.  Here's why:
 - cucurbits (all plants in the gourd, pumpkin, squash, melon, cucumber family) don't like "wet feet"!  They need plenty of water, but they want it to drain away.  They don't want their roots water-logged.
 - in areas of the world where there is a lot of rain, it is necessary to plant these plants in raised mounds  so the water will drain away from the roots.
 - Here in Utah, we don't get a lot of extra rain in the summer so it is not a huge issue.
 - To be efficient with water, you can even plant cucurbits in slight depressions in the soil, so that the water runs toward the plant, soaking into the soil and going to the roots - not running off the mound and away from the plant.
**HOWEVER, if you have clay soil, which drains very slowly, you might not have fast enough drainage and your cucurbits could get wet feet.  In that case, go ahead and plant them in mounds.

Here is my friend Jenny planting the seeds in the pumpkin patch at the community garden - not in mounds.

Here are the pumpkins and squashes we grew in the pumpkin patch at the community garden last year.