Category Archives: Garden Thoughts
Planting Day!
Yesterday was our big planting day in the Demo Garden. Our first planting day in the new garden! Most years we have 2 or 3 days when we do some major planting, but because of the renovation we ended up planting pretty much the entire garden at once. I will say that I am missing all of the colors and textures that the spring vegetables bring to a garden, although we really didn’t have any choice but to focus entirely on summer vegetables this year.
The gals doing the Edible Flowers Garden were so on the ball that they had almost everything planted before I could take more pictures! Here’s the post with the plan for this garden.
We have a whole bed planned for the cattle panel trellises again this year. Unfortunately, we planned the trellis garden for the landscape paver bed, which is slightly narrower planting space because of the width of the pavers. It makes the space under the trellises narrower and slightly harder to work with. I’m sure it will be fine, but it maybe shouldn’t have been the first choice! Everything in the bed was planted from seed – cucumbers, squash, and melons. Here’s the garden plan if you want to see what we planted.
Here’s a look at the Mexican Garden. We had jicama, Mexican oregano, tomatillos, peppers, and the Red Aztec Spinach ready to transplant. The jicama and some cantaloupe get to fight over the trellis! We also planted black beans and some zucchini. Here’s the map and original post about the plans.
As is tradition, we have an entire raised bed devoted to tomatoes. We are doing the Florida Weave method in half of it and tomato cages in the other half. Although I greatly prefer the Florida Weave method, I think that due to the width of our bed, it is probably not the most efficient use of space with our current layout. Here’s the post about the plans and the varieties we’re growing this year.
Our Family of 4 Garden is smaller this year. It is about 14′ x 4′ as opposed to the 25′ x 4′ that it has been the last few years. We’ll of course take that into account with the dollar amounts we accrue over the season. We’ll also expect lower numbers since we don’t have any spring crops in. Apparently I somehow overlooked writing a post about our plans for the Family of 4 Garden. Here’s a picture of the bed plan:
This is our long plastic lumber bed with the two square second tiers. Half of the bed will be for the Prairie Star Annual Flower trials, and the other half is the Family of 4 Garden. As you can see, we have a pretty limited range of vegetables this year. Green beans, 2 zucchini, 2 cucumbers, 2 tomatoes, and 3 peppers. We should be able to get some fall things in after the beans and maybe after some of the other plants as well.
In the Beautiful Vegetables Garden, the first step was putting up some T posts to use for a bean trellis. We were going to use a wire trellis, but I think they are now planning to use a wire with twine hanging down for the beans. I’ll show more pictures when they get that project done. Meanwhile, here’s the original post with the plans.
I didn’t get an overview picture of the New & Unique Vegetable Garden, but I did take a couple pictures of the Litchi Tomato. It is just starting to develop its prickles, so you can’t really see them yet. I can foresee taking lots of pictures of this cool plant this summer. Here’s the bed plan for the New & Unique Vegetable Garden.
I think that’s it for this round of planting! We still have the 2 herb beds to plant as well as the Prairie Star Annuals (which arrived yesterday afternoon) and some of the containers.
Raised Bed Soil Mix
We have one raised bed with soil in it! Granted, it is one of the small, square beds, but it’s a start! We’ll be filling the rest of the raised beds throughout the week.
This particular raised bed we got a donation from Gard’n'Wise to try one of their specially packaged raised bed soil mixes. We certainly don’t recommend that you HAVE to use a mix like this (we aren’t for the rest of them!). It will be fun to try it and see how it works though.
We put about 5 inches of woodchips in the bottom of the raised bed, because we didn’t have quite enough of the bagged soil mix to fill it completely full. They will break down over time and we can add more compost to the top to make up the difference.
Here you can see the list of ingredients in the mix. I don’t know how it holds water, so I’m not sure I agree with the bag’s recommendation as ideal for container gardening. Maybe it would work well for some of those big, Smart Pots that we tried a couple years ago. It is a mixture of topsoil, cotton burr compost, coconut coir, expanded shale (kind of like gravel, but popped like popcorn), humate, and several different types of ground rock/sand. I’ll be curious to see how it tests when we run the soil tests on it.
It actually looks kind of disgusting, if you think about it too much. The long fibers are most likely the coconut coir. You can also see a couple of the expanded shale rocks on the left side. Otherwise, just a nice, light (relatively) mix of soil. Definitely not as light as a normal soilless potting mix, but lighter than your average, mineral garden soil. I wonder if we will have trouble keeping it moist in a hot year?
There you have it! Our first filled raised bed. Now we are guaranteed at least one 16 sq. ft. area in which to garden this year.
Starting Lemongrass
We had lemongrass in the Demo Garden back in 2010, as part of our Asian Garden. For some reason, the only pictures I have of it were at the harvest stage. It was a really pretty plant! Lemongrass is a fountain-shaped grass that is valued in Southeast Asian cooking for its lemon flavor and scent. It is hardy to zone 8, so it is an annual plant for us in Kansas. However, it has plenty of time and warm weather to develop good quality stalks during our summer growing season.
As a tropical plant, lemongrass should be started indoors or in a greenhouse, and then transplanted outside after all danger of frost is past and the soil is quite warm. I would expect mid-May to be a good average planting date for lemongrass in south central Kansas. Once the weather turns hot and humid, it will grow quickly. Lemongrass plants can easily reach a diameter of 3 feet in one growing season in Kansas, so it is wise to space them at least 2-3 feet apart when planting.
If desired, at the end of the growing season, a few stalks can be harvested and potted indoors or in the greenhouse to provide propagation stock for the next season.
There are two main types of lemongrass, East Indian Lemongrass and West Indian Lemongrass. Both can be grown and used for cooking and teas, although the West Indian Lemongrass has a better culinary value.
East Indian Lemongrass can be grown from seed. It does not have as thick of stalks or as strong a flavor as the West Indian, although the leaves can be used in teas or for flavorings.
West Indian Lemongrass has thicker stalks, yielding better for culinary uses. This type of lemongrass should be started from divisions of an existing plant or by rooting a stalk from a grocery story source. Each plant will produce up to 12 thick stalks, and will re-grow if cut near the ground. You can sometimes find seeds for West Indian Lemongrass, but it is hard to know what the quality of the plant will be until you try them.
We are not growing lemongrass in the Demo Garden this year, but my husband and I love Thai food, so we are going to grow a couple plants in our community garden plot. I wanted to make sure we got the West Indian Lemongrass (I think we had East Indian in the Demo Garden last time), so I went and bought a couple of stalks from the grocery store.
Like every good gardener, I did a Google search on propagating lemongrass from the stalks. It looks like everyone tries to start them in a jar of water, and then transplant them into soil after that. As a horticulturalist, I know that this is not usually an ideal scenario, because the roots that grow in the water are adapted to low-oxygen. It stresses the plant more to start in water and transplant than it does to start a cutting in perlite or even potting soil. I decided to forgo the perlite and just try planting the stalks in potting soil.
I wanted to make sure I bought stalks that still have the base intact. You can see that 3 of the 4 stalks do. 2 of them are even growing a little mold. I don’t think that should be a problem, but we’ll see. The 4th stalk has obviously been cut away. I’m skeptical that it will grow, since it seemed more dried out. We’ll watch and see what happens!
I trimmed the stalks down so that they were only about 6 inches long. The tops are usually pretty dry and more likely to be dead.
From there I just stuck them about 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep in moist potting soil and then put them under my lights. I’ll keep you posted on how they do.
New Raspberry Varieties from Cornell University
Cornell University in New York has announced the release of 2 new raspberry varieties. They look pretty neat! Of course, releasing them right now means that they won’t be available on the market until next spring. But hey – that’s something to look forward to next year! (For the full story, go here.)
The two varieties are Double Gold and Crimson Night. Both varieties are fall-bearing (primocane fruiting) types. Double Gold is a new gold variety with an attractive pink blush. Of particular interest to those of us growing in a clay soil, Double Gold has shown resistance to Phytophthora Root Rot. If you’ve been around the Demo Garden Blog for awhile, you might remember that our raspberries got Phytophthora Root Rot in 2010.
Crimson Night is fairly compact with dark purple canes, making it an interesting possibility for more ornamental plantings or container plantings.
Of course, the challenge with any new fruit variety is that we just don’t know how they will do for us in Kansas. New York is a great place to breed and grow raspberries, but fruit that does great in their breeding program may or may not tolerate a hot Kansas summer. In particular, gold raspberries tend to struggle in the heat. It would be interesting to see if the pink blush in the Double Gold makes the fruit a little more tolerant to sunscald.
So…you have 9 months to plan and prepare for a new raspberry bed if you want to give either of these a try next year!
Vegetable Garden Fertilizers & Pesticides
With the gardening season well underway, thanks to the early, warm spring, I think lots of Kansas gardeners are trying their best to make sure that they have a great garden this year, after the dismal year we had last year. As you are getting your garden started, I would encourage you to take extra care in choosing what you apply to your garden. Many of the products that we routinely use for flowers and other ornamentals are not safe to use on your vegetable garden!
It is very tempting to grab that bag of fertilizer or bottle of pesticide that you bought for your lawn or trees or flowers and use it on your vegetable garden. Sometimes, that is okay. Other times, it can be a BIG problem. Before you apply any product – fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, fungicide – read the label! It should clearly state that it is safe to use on vegetables. If you are in doubt at all, go buy a product that is specifically for vegetable gardens.
I can’t emphasize enough….READ THE LABEL BEFORE USING ANYTHING!!!
Fertilizers are usually not a problem, as long as they are not combined with another product. The biggest mistake people make is using a “Weed & Feed” product they bought for their lawn. Yes, you might want to prevent weeds in your vegetable garden, but the particular herbicides in those Weed & Feed products are designed to kill plants like your vegetables. Some of those herbicides will persist in the soil and cause problems for your vegetables for 6-12 months!
Insecticides and fungicides are another issue. Herbicides prevent plants from growing, so you are unlikely to even get a crop. With insecticides and fungicides, a product that is not specifically labeled for use on vegetables may not be safe to use. Those residues may be in or on the plant, causing unknown harm. While unlikely that you would immediately get sick from eating a tomato with a chemical residue not intended for consumption, it is not a good idea to take a risk on pesticides that have not been labeled for use on a food crop or that are at a higher concentration than is labeled for safe use on food crops. You want to consider both short-term and long-term health in those cases, especially if you have young children or elderly in your family.
I personally would avoid consuming produce from a garden that has been treated with a product that is not labeled for edibles. I don’t think it is worth the risk.
