Tuesday, May 28, 2013

a mixed result

failure is a constant in gardening...there have already been failures this season and there will be more...but these are tempered by the successes which generally outweigh the losses and that is the case at the iu northwest community garden tonight..there are now ten sweet corn plants up and running ( top photo ) and the hopi blue maize is topping out around four inches with the largest plants ( second photo )...five of the six yukon gold potatoes i planted are up in the sweet corn bed ( third photo ) and the fifteen red nordlands have already been hilled once and look strong and healthy ( fourth photo )...on the down side one of the hopi blue plant had seriously yellowed ( usually a sign of entirely too much water...it is drowning ) and seems on its way to failure...so i will be soaking more hopi blue seeds tomorrow to replant wednesday both at the community garden and at the pgp which has seen maize setbacks as well...despite these disappointments the season has gone well so far , even with the changes of direction that have been dictated by nature...the next building project will be a trellis for the cucumbers...i knew we would be going vertical with the vines so i deliberately placed them on the north side of the bed so they would not shade the peppers ( where are they? ) and the kohlrabi...placing the taller plants on the north side of a bed is an old design dating back to at least the first world war and reinforced by the victory gardens that were part of the home-based food economy that allowed the u s to feed its military, its allies during the second world war, and a good part of europe after the war...a part of the history of the war that gets little air time but may be a harbinger of a home-based economy to come.

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