This is Disco, the official Bay Dirt garden mascot. Happy wordless-ish Wednesday.
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Yesterday I helped a fabulous friend harvest the worms and their goodies from her worm bin. It was full of rich compost + worm castings and a big bounty of rich worm tea. Lucky me got some to take home. The only containers on hand were empty booze bottles from the recycling bin. So behold, whiskey bottle worm tea.
Don’t be fooled by the “tea” part though. This stuff is not for human consumption. But it’s an amazing natural and nutrient-rich fertilizer for your plants. Because it’s liquid, the nutrients are easily absorbed by your plants. Fresh worm tea like this can be diluted, since it’s so generally so concentrated.
For more adventures in urban gardening follow me on Twitter: @baydirt
Spring at the community garden means lots of cleaning up to do. I spent a lovely part of the afternoon last weekend weeding, pulling out old plants, seeing how things over-wintered and what re-seeded. There’s a lot of mint and lemon balm that pops up, so weeding is always well scented.
I pulled out a couple crazy HUGE chard plants that had grown to almost four feet tall! My foot is at the bottom of this picture for scale. I was able to salvage some of the leaves for harvest before chopping the rest of this monster up for the the compost bin.
My scarlet runner bean plant is coming back up for its third season in my garden! It was one of the first plants that went in the garden after I got this garden plot. Since these are perennial, I cut them off at the soil level in late fall. Last year it came back super robust, and is sprouting up again after being dormant over the winter.
Borage is one of my all time favorite plants, and I’m always happy when it reseeds itself all over the garden. The flowers are a beautiful bright blue, edible (they taste like cucumber!), and attract bees for a pollination party in your garden.
There are little dill plants popping up throughout the garden. Good thing I love dill. I need some good recipes to make the most of it, so please share any good recipes that use dill.
My dear African Blue Basil. I planted this perennial variety last year, after several unsuccessful attempts to grow standard green Genovese basil and purple basil. Maybe this one is the best of both worlds — the leaves are green on top and purple on the bottom. It’s a woody, studier plant, but the leaves are just as basil-y aromatic and tasty as any other.
There were also several people up at the community garden when I was there last weekend. It’s always nerdy garden fun to check out each others’ plots and show off what we’re growing. A neighbor garden and I swapped plants. She sent me home with some of oregano harvest (some of which I cooked with already and some that I’m drying). And after she asked about the purple orach seedlings that had sprouted up in droves (they’re the purple plants in the pic at the top of this post), I dug some up and now they live in her plot.
Here’s what overwintered or reseeded:
* Thyme
* Valerian
* Yarrow
* African blue basil
* Chives
* Scarlet runner bean
* Nasturtium
* Borage
* Dill
* Purple orach
* Anise hyssop
* Stridolo
I also planted new starts of bulls blood beets and erbetta chard. (Erbetta chard did amazingly well in the garden last year, and somehow resisted gross leafminers better than the regular chard. So far as I can tell, erbetta chard goes by a number of names, including: erbette, taglia verde, Italian chard, and perpetual spinach.)
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There’s nothing quite like the taste of a a just-picked sugar snap pea. They’re super sweet, like a crunchy succulent candy. Last year I grew peas in a container on my deck. But this year I’m taking full advantage of having a backyard (I know, I’m saying this in just about every post — that’s how excited I am to have more gardening space!) and am growing even more peas. Yesterday I had the day off work for Cesar Chavez Day, and decided to spend the day gardening. I made a pea trellis! Somehow this is incredibly exciting.
The peas on the right are looking a little sickly. I bought them as starts and they had been in the six-pack too long. I like an underdog though, and gave them lots of yummy (well, to the plants) grape pomace compost to nourish them back to vibrance. I tied them gently to the stakes because they had been flopping over and needed a let help getting their vertical on. On the left are two of the gorgeous healthy peas I grew from seed. This is what they looked like pre-planting:
Making the trellis was easy. I already had stakes, and each pea plant got its own. Then I wove string horizontally across all the stakes. As peas grow, they will send out shoots galore. The more that the tendrils have to twirl around, the better. Use tall stakes, because you’ll be amazed at how high peas can climb. My peas in a container last year were over four feet tall and started to flop over.
Here’s a bigger view of the trellis:
If you’re gardening in a small space, even on an apartment balcony, peas are a great option, because you can plop them in a container (go with one about a foot deep) and just let them go vertical. But do give them something for their tendrils to wind around as they climb up, up, up. I also planted violas in the pot last year. The pop of bright purplish blue was gorgeous next tot he springy green of the pea plants.
If you’ve got space, in the ground or in a container, peas are such a good plant to grow. Look how much they’re going for at the farmers market right now!
Happy spring and happy planting.
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I’m loving my gorgeous purple mustard greens and am showing them off for a quasi-wordless Wednesday post. I planted them from starts in late fall and now they’re going gangbusters. They are spicy delicious. I sautée them, just like you would with spinach or chard. If you want more of their hot kick, cook them just slightly. And, as some of you know, I’m obsessed with gardening in purple and really like this major pop of color in my garden.
Mustard greens are super easy to grow, and don’t seem to get infested with the various bugs that my other greens get. Maybe that’s because I’ve been growing through winter, but I haven’t seen even a hint of an evil cabbage worm. And the aphids that have thoroughly infested my kale haven’t even touched these. Mustard greens will also do just fine in pots, although they probably won’t get as large. The last couple years my mustard greens have been in containers and, yes, it’s so exciting to see how much bigger they can get in the ground. Although really big pots might do the trick too.
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