New Egyptian Garden: 2007

Hello. Welcome to the very first post. This is my garden. Well it’s our garden. I just own the plants. My girlfriend, Kathy, pays the rent and the landlord owns the land but he’s a jerk and wouldn’t know what to do with it anyhow. Jerk. He runs some kind of phony – baloney farm that covers the Earth with black plastic and grows potted plants. How stupid is that? The houses he rents out are total pieces of crap but that’s not why we are here. Gardening is why we are here.

Kathy's rented house is in a town that claims to be the geographic center of New Jersey. New Egypt. The back yard is pretty big and the soil is really excellent in most spots. I don't live in a house. I live in a loft in my shop like a bohemian artist so I jumped at the chance to plant a real garden in real soil. I have a small container garden in the shop which is nice but I'm not about to try growing corn or potatoes that way. Kathy moved into this place in the late summer of ’06. The hottest week in a long, long time, I might add. She also sprained her ankle in the process. I should also add that the aforementioned slumlord more or less forced her out of a reasonably priced apartment by jacking the rent way up and was totally unsympathetic to her ankle which she sprained on his property due to insufficient lighting, but that’s another story and we are her for gardening. A pox upon him!

As this was late summer it was too late for a garden then but I took note of the soil which I found to be fair to excellent. Of course I had to put in a garden in '07. I tried to be organic but there were way too many bugs and I had to break down and use the chemical pesticide Seven in an effort to keep up to all the various and plentiful insects that couldn't find anything better to eat than my garden plants or have total crop failure. I later discovered the organic pesticide BT (Bacillus Thuringiensis) which doesn't pack the wallop of Seven but seemed to work. I'll try really hard this season to avoid the Seven. The place is lousy with slugs too and the WMD for them was diatomaceous earth. It looks like white powder to us but on a slugs level it's like a pile of broken glass. I'm working on compost as well, no shortage of leaves and kitchen garbage, but I'd like to get some good manure. Preferably I'd like to get it from an organic farm that doesn't load their animals up with antibiotics and growth hormones. I've been a gardener for years but have rarely had the good fortune to have access to a decent plot of land. I was a fan of the original "Crockett's Victory Garden" and have most of Mr. C's books. There is a used book store (The Book Garden Rt. 537 New Egypt) with more books in one place than I have ever seen outside of a library and bought about a hundred pounds of gardening books there. I also like to listen to "You Bet Your Garden" on NPR, the host, Mike McGrath used to be the editor of "Organic Gardening Magazine." The web is a great help with various gardening web sites but still there is nothing like human interaction with real people either on the web or in person. I found a good family run nursery (Patterson Greenhouses) to buy plants (after I killed almost all of my seed grown peppers and egg plants) and Mr. Patterson is nice enough to let me pick his brain. He has been farmer all his life and looks like he started in the Coolidge administration.

Most of the plants were started in mid March indoors under lights in peat pots. This included plants that are not usually started this way like beans, peas and corn. The beans and peas got way too overgrown and were rather difficult to transplant. The methods I used were similar to "Square Foot Gardening" and I used raised beds most of the time. I worked peat - I have forgotten how many bales, at least 5 - and 5-10-5 fertilizer into the soil of a roughly 20' x 40' plot. I also "mined" some very rich soil from what appeared to be an old compost / trash pile I discovered in the farthest reaches of the property. As I said I set out trying to do this all organically. Well except for the 5-10-5 that is. I really wanted to avoid spraying poison on everything and loading the soil up with chemical salts. I probably should have skipped the 5-10-5. Not everything was grown in the main plot. Pumpkins and some of the potatoes were grown in two separate side plots. I grew way too many tomatoes; I estimate around a hundred pounds. This is despite the fact that slugs ate probably 25 pounds before I figured out how to control them. The potatoes were good but the crop was smallish and the spuds in the side plot had almost no yield at all. I later attributed this to too much shade. The broccoli was a total loss due to a couple of different kinds of caterpillars (cabbage loopers) and a fat, hungry groundhog. I'm growing all cabbage family plants in 5 gallon spackle buckets this year to keep them out of rodent reach and will probably cover them with screens to keep them away from egg dropping cabbage looper moths. The corn didn't do very well, it seemed dwarfed. I probably shouldn't have started it inside and transplanted it. It produced half sized ears with normal sized kernels and they were quite delicious but I'm not doing corn again next year as there is a lot of really excellent corn available in the summer from road side stands in this part of the country. Cheap too. The cauliflower was much the same as the broccoli but I managed to get a few decent heads. I found a bizarre bug that looked like a tiny beach umbrella with legs that I could not identify in any book or on the net eating the potato leaves. The BT seemed to take care of it. Most of the pepper plants that I grew from seed died when I transplanted them too early because of cold soil and the survivors and the store bought replacements caught some kind of crud that made the leaves get all crinkly like spinach and the fruits developed "woody" spots but there were some decent yields particularly if you cut around the woody spots. However, the Jalapeños were very successful and incredibly hot. It's too bad I don't like Jalapeños. The eggplants suffered the same cold soil problems and I lost most of them. I bought a couple of nice healthy replacements and they yielded some nice fruits. I don't really care for eggplant though so I'm not growing it this year. The squash and pumpkins came in like gangbusters and I got a few huge yellow squashes and several nice spaghetti squashes but the vines soon wilted as they became infested with vine borers. Once these little maggots get in it's all over. I got 2 small pumpkins before they wilted too from the same pest. The string beans ("Kentucky Wonder") were the most successful of the lot besides the `maters. I got around 50 pounds but the Limas and wax beans did not do well. I think it was transplant problems. I had one and only one cabbage. It got pretty big but the day before I was about to harvest it the groundhog ate it. I also grew a ton of spices, parsley, sage, coriander and 3 different kinds of basil. I also planted rosemary but it didn't do well. The oregano and marjoram didn't come up at all. In any case I learned many lessons. This year I will do many things differently. Brussel sprouts and artichoke are on the schedule. I think I'll get a trap and catch that groundhog too. Did I mention that my girlfriend's landlord runs some kind of half-assed farm? I think I'll release the groundhog over there.