Another great garden workbee yesterday, with a huge turnout for the beautiful weather! We definitely took advantage of the increased manpower available, installing a chicken wire trellis for our peas, fixing the irrigation system, and doing a huge amount of weeding and prepping of beds. We’ve now got corn in the ground, waiting to be joined by the other two sisters of beans and squash in a few weeks. Eggplants were put in by the green beans to ward off Colorado Potato Beetle, and a wide variety of heirloom and non-heirloom tomato varieties were interplanted with basil and parsley to improve growth. We also put in a few cucumber plants, and Phyllis was sure to plant a few radish seeds around the base of each to ward off the cucumber beetle. Pennyroyal was also liberally planted around the bed for its purported insect and squirrel repelling properties. If it works, I’ll be going out to buy tons more!
We faced our first bug infestation this week, flea beetles were spotted chewing small circular holes through our
Flea Beetle Damage
oriental greens, and making incursions into the neighbouring spinach. I’ve done a little research, and besides preventing them by timing your planting for when they’re least likely to be out, and keeping your plants healthy and well watered so they aren’t vulnerable to attack, there are a few natural control techniques that seem to work. The first is to use yellow sticky traps. Like many pests, flea beetles are attracted to the colour yellow, so these sticky traps can be used to attract them away from the plant, and then trap them. Since these traps can catch beneficial insects as well, it’s best to just hold them under the plant and brush the leaves so the flea beetles jump off, rather than leaving them in the garden to trap indiscriminately. I tried making an emergency trap yesterday using a piece of card and a gluestick, to no avail, so I’ll try something stickier and report back. If this doesn’t work, we’ll try making a homemade pest spray next week in the garden, and also planting some nasturtiums around the garden, as our seeds never did come up. If the flea beetles are attracted to yellow, nasturtiums should do the trick!
Another exciting development of this week was the construction of our vertical potato garden. This is a fascinating space saving technique for growing potatoes, which has the added benefit of keeping them away from pests that may be lurking in the garden soil. Here’s how it works:
Often a garbage can with air and drainage holes is used for this type of planting, but we decided to use an old black plastic composter for our potato planter, as it has great ventilation, is stackable, which allows it to grow as the potato plants grow, and we just had it lying around and are always keen to reuse what we can. The concept behind the vertical potato farm is simple. Fill the bottom of your potato container with 6 inches of compost, then spread your chitted potatoes (potatoes with eyes beginning to sprout) on top. Chitting potatoes first isn’t absolutely necessary, but helps them to grow faster and takes little extra effort. Cover these potatoes with 3 more inches of compost, water and then wait! Once the seedlings poke through about an inch, cover them with another 3 inches of compost. Continue this process until the plants reach the top of your container, and then allow them to grow and flower. They should grow potatoes all the way up the height of your container.
Our vertical potato planter
A great feature of this technique is the ease of harvesting- just dump the container or, in our case, take apart the composter, and there you’ll find all the potatoes you’ve grown, no more lost potatoes in the field! We planted 5 different varieties, 2 new potatoes, one blue variety, yukon golds, and a brazilian red skinned potato I don’t have much hope for as they were really behind the curve in the chitting process. New volunteer this week Lil suggested we cover the planter with chicken wire to keep marauding squirrels and parkgoers from digging up our new potato plants, so we wired on some easily removable protection overtop. We’ll keep you up to date on this technique throughout the season with pictures. Anyone with vertical potato growing experience please let us know your suggestions.
down the garden path 