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Urban Gardens & Farms in KC
One of the reasons the blog has been so quiet recently is that I was up in Overland Park helping with the National Association of County Agriculture Agents annual conference. We always have tours as part of the conference, and I helped organize and lead an Urban Agriculture tour. We visited the Kansas City Community Gardens, a couple of different farms, and the New Roots for Refugees Juniper Gardens Training Farm.
The summer has been hot up there, but as you will be able to see from the numbers of tomatoes, not as bad as it has been here.
Most of the tomato plants we saw looked much sadder – diseased, spider mite laden, etc than most of our plants here. However, the striking difference was all those red things hanging from the plants. Yes, those are real, ripe-on-the-plant tomatoes. They do exist! I’d trade my relatively healthy plants for the plants with tomatoes on them, wouldn’t you?
This urban farm is JJ Farm, and the owner, John Kaihua. He farms on 1 1/2 acres of backyards, and sells his produce through a CSA and a small farmers market. He had beautiful, huge red bell peppers of which I was very jealous! It’s pretty cool what you can do with some backyard space.
This is part of the Juniper Gardens Training Farm and the New Roots for Refugees program. You can see one of the women watering her plot. Each woman gets a 1/4 acre plot and assistance with seeds & plants, water, gardening, English, and business skills, and then sells the produce at a local farmers market. Over 4 years, the women transition to more independence and ultimately their own small urban farms, using the skills they have gained.
Here are a couple of the women unloading after a farmers market.
We visited a small farm at the Andrew Drumm Institute. They had this homemade chicken tractor in one of the fallow fields on the farm.
This is the raised bed section of the Kansas City Community Garden. Each raised bed can be rented be an individual or family, and all the plots at this garden are on a sliding fee scale, based on income. The raised beds are in areas where the soil is too clay or the drainage too poor for other gardening.
The Kansas City Community Gardens also have a Children’s garden with lots of different types of plants for education. This is a dwarf apple tree in the Children’s Garden.
One of the Master Gardeners was at the garden the morning we visited, and he was kind enough to pick a few watermelons from their demonstration plot at the garden and let us sample. Some of them were definitely better than others. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the really good one.
Last, but not least, we visited the Gibbs Road Community Farm with the Cultivate Kansas City organization. This is a very intensive small farm in Kansas City, Kansas, where they train apprentices in small-scale organic farming. You can see the intensity with the row of squash between two high tunnels!
Either tomorrow or Wednesday, I hope to get another post up about things I was up to in the past couple weeks.
Video Wednesday
One of the most common questions that we get about growing fruit is how to grow blueberries in Kansas. About half of those inquiries come after the first plant has died, and the other half come after the gardener saw some bushes on sale at a big box store (either before or after they bought one).
Growing blueberries in Kansas is worth a whole series of posts, and I’m not going to take up the space to do the topic justice right now. It would be a good series to do in the winter sometime, when there’s not much else to write about.
In the meantime, you can get a few tips from this video:
Friday PhotoEssay
I think we got about another 2.25 inches of rain this week. Hurray! Although, for the garden at least, we can hold off on more water for now.
The gooseberry bush is loaded again this year. (The thorny one, that is. The thornless one…not so much!)These will be a dark red color when they are ready to pick.
The black raspberries are also ripening as we speak. This first berry might be ripe by Monday (if someone doesn’t pick it this weekend, thinking it’s already ripe!). Any bets?
The red currant bush, on the other hand, is not looking so good. It was so loaded with fruit last year, and this year it has hardly any fruit. The fruit is also getting shriveled. I’m thinking there is some root damage here. Hard to say if it was the heat last summer, the cold last winter, the dry spring, or the heavy crop last year that hurt it. Probably some combination of the above. About half of the plant was dead to the base this spring, and what’s left isn’t very healthy in appearance. I doubt it will make it, if we don’t decide to put it out of its misery before it completely dies. It’s sad, because it was so nice last year!
A gratuitous Swiss Chard picture, because you know I can’t help myself. It’s already photogenic!
Our second planting of tomatoes is growing in my office. They will be planted in mid-June. They are all heat-set types, which means that they will be boring, round red tomatoes. Not that I’m at all prejudiced! It will be interesting to see how they do, though.
Hey, look what we’ve got! These are the first flowers on our tomato plants. These flowers are on the ‘Early Girl’, and we’re also seeing a few flowers on the ‘Margherita’ roma tomato.
Have a great (long) weekend!
Harvest Report
We had a modest harvest from the Family of 4 Garden today, and a whole lot of strawberries.
DON’T try this at home! This is 5.25 pounds of strawberries. If you stack them up like this for too long, you will end up with strawberry mush. I always seem to underestimate our little strawberry patch. For some reason, the first berries are small and not very nice. Then we get this huge onslaught of fruit. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. I wish the berry size was better on this variety, ‘Eversweet’. It’s a nice enough variety, but there are much better varieties out there.
We harvested another head of the ‘Caraflex’ cabbage, as well as half a pound of lettuce from the Family of 4 Garden.
The lettuce is almost done, but there’s still a little bit. We harvested about 1/2 lb. of lettuce this week. We could also start harvesting the Swiss Chard soon, but we didn’t this week.
Family of 4 Harvest:
1/2 lb. lettuce @ $7.00/lb = $3.50
Weekly Total = $3.50
Year to Date = $85.02
Friday PhotoEssay
Herb Day is tomorrow, so come on out and buy your herbs for the summer, eat some good food, and attend seminars on herbs and pollinators.
I continue t be amazed by how many strawberries are on the plants this spring. I almost think the plants might have too many berries. We’ll have to make sure to give them a little fertilizer in mid-summer when the fruiting slows down.
The black raspberries are also in the process of blooming. It is really easy to miss the fact that they’re blooming, because the flowers aren’t all that big and showy. They are even smaller than red raspberry flowers. Of course, the fruit tend to be smaller too.
The potatoes in the Family of 4 Garden are growing quite rapidly. It’s not quite a potato jungle yet, but I think it could get there by the time they are full grown.
I know I’ve posted at least one cabbage picture every week now, but the blue-green leaves are so pretty and the pointed heads are just too cool.
The grafted tomatoes are finally big enough that the clips are starting to come off. Can you tell where this plant was grafted? I’m not sure you would notice if you didn’t know to look for it.
These four lettuces are looking great. I really like the contrast of colors and textures.
Have a great weekend!
The Demo Garden Blog 