WEEK IV - June 2 - 4

WEEK IV

June 2

Working at the terraces

West terraces

Weeding

Students planted three varieties of sunflower along the north wall of the west terraces, close to the main entrance. Next week we will plant a row of corn front of the sunflowers and beans on the bed across from sunflowers.

Weeding was conducted in and around some of the beds using the wheel how. Some beds were hand weeded because weeds too close to the seedlings.

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Transplants

The squash on the south beds of the west terraces, transplants from seedlings growing in the lab, showed good establishing and survival rates, especially the ones against the wall, maybe perhaps due to the microclimate created by the walls facing south, or may just be bigger, healthier transplants that were placed there by chance. There’s also a noticeable difference in size already between the tomatoes and squash growing in the tunnel and the ones growing outside the tunnels, the ones in the tunnel are already larger in size. All these vines will need trellising soon.

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Seeders

Observing the beds where we are comparing the Earthway and the Jang seeder, there’s definitely a difference in seed density. The row of lettuce sowed by the Jang seeder is denser than the row sowed by the Earthway seeder. The later is more scatter and patchy.

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Spinach

The spinach next to the kale is going to seed. We planted two varieties, the tyee and the Bloomsdale savoy, the Tyee is bolt resistant and although the label on the blooming spinaches by the kale reads Tyee, we believe this was mislabeled as tyee and the blooming plant might just be the savoy variety. Also the savoy has a much crankier leaf than the Tyee.

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Pac Choi

The pac choi is ready to harvest, some of it is going to seed, beautiful yellow flowers, a broccoli like flower characteristic of the brassicas. As they go to seed, the leaves are going to get a much pungent flavor, but are still be edible.

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Garlic

We need to harvest the garlic escapes before they go to flower.

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Leeks

Some of the leeks transplants survived and are still around but our all ions harvest is going to be small this year.

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Potatoes

The potatoes are flowering. After blooming, the plants will be allocating photoassimilates down into the root, and the tubers will start to size up. At this point, there will not be anymore cell division in those tubers, cell number is already established and now cell will start to increase in size. At this point, we need to mount the potatoes. There’s signs of dead tissue in some of the varieties, however, there’s no fussy or moldy signs on the necrotic spots, therefore, we can be confident to overrule early blight, especially since there hasn’t been any effective precipitation over the last month and it has been an extremely dry and sunny, unusual spring. Additionally, the samples of tissue that were taken to the lab showed the presence of some sort of fungi spores but not the lemon shape spores of early blight.

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Peas

We need to harvest more peas so they continue to flower. Usually people discourage harvesting peas when the foliage is wet because peas don’t have a very strong root system, and wet soil tend to be a loosen the soil, so it is really easy to yank pea plants by mistake while trying to pull the peas out. It is important we snap the pea off instead of pulling it off, specially because we have a loose sandy soil already in the terraces, which becomes looser with the rain. Aphid population in peas and broad beans is still an issue in spite of of having a very healthy ladybug population. We will need to spray the plants with water to try to remove some of the layers of aphids that are attached to the surface of the leaves, stems and pea pods. The next approach will be a safe soap application in order to dissolve the waxing cuticle of some of these aphids. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any predatory wasps that could apply some pressure to the aphid population. 

We checked for presence and amount of mycorrhiza in pea roots. We found a fair amount, which indicates the soil has a balance amount of nitrogen, lack of nitrogen would've led to a larger amount, yellowing of the foliage and perhaps the presence of clover and other leguminous species in the bed.

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Carrots

Carrots show poor germination rates, with the ones behind the sign being weaker and smaller than the rest. In a large production setting, farmers prefer to plant the carrots at the same time so they can harvest them all together using a mechanical harvester. A lot of gardeners however prefer to have the crop staggered in order not to have to eat or process all the carrots at the same time. We can mimic this approach and reseed in order to fill in the gaps that we have in our carrot rows. In the meantime we will continue using cover to protect them from pests and dehydration.

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East Terrace Experimental Plots

We harvested and weighted the lettuce and the spinach from the experimental plots. We recorded everything in the chart for later analysis.

We see mushrooms growing in the Net Zero plot, not in the Harvest Power or the sand plots. There’s the spores present and the right mix of carbon and nitrogen in the Net Zero compost.

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Spinach

Some of the spinach in the east terraces was eaten by rabbits, this is obviously going to affect our yield. Most of the plants are going to seed, most of the plants of the Bloomdale Savoy bolted rather earlier. We  harvested the  spinach and recorded weight and counts, and record the ones that have been eaten by rabbits and probably exclude those ones. We did the same with the lettuce. We will leave the chard. We will be able to obtain some yield data.

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Lambs quarter

The lambs quarter is doing very well and looks gorgeous!

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Presence of plastic pieces in the compost

In order to obtain a more accurate estimate, a count of the number of pieces of plastic that came with the compost from the two different suppliers was obtained by scooping three littler samples from every plot and by placing the sample on a tray, and counting the number of plastic particles found in of the samples.