Our Community Garden- Progress and lessons learned: Part 1 Germination, Planting, and Early Season

Our 15x15 garden plot at the Battelle Community Gardens. Picture taken late April, 2010

This year, Aisling and I are renting a 15ft x 15ft plot of community gardening area from the Battelle Staff Association. The community garden is maintained by two women who work for PNNL. It is installed with a series of vertical pipes with sprinkler-heads at a height of about 8 ft that water the gardens each day. There are communal tools in a tool shed that everyone can use,as well as vine wire-frames, stakes, and netting (to use as primitive fence) so that there is really no upfront cost to the aspiring community gardner other than the $10/plot and the cost of seeds, and any other lawn & garden 'helpers' that the grower may decide to employ (we bought some mulch and potting mix for example).

This has mostly been my project - because I want to get into local food growing, and because Aisling largely gets her fill of food growing while working at the farm. The project started in February when we bought a tomato growing kit from our local grocery store. The kit comes with these little soil pods that expand in water and serve as a substrate for starting tomato plants in this plastic greenhouse that the kit turns into. It took a solid 2 weeks to see anything come out of the seeds, and within a month, we had healthy green saplings lapping up the light coming in from our downstairs windowsill. Meanwhile, we bought a number of seed packets - 3 other types of tomatoes, cauliflower, cantaloupe, watermelon, and corn. This makes up the bulk of what we are currently growing or trying to grow in our garden.
For these other seeds, the first attempt at germinating them was to get a large ceramic dish, fill it with soil from the back of the townhouse, sprinkle seeds on top, and keep it continuously watered on the windowsill. This was marginally successful, but slow. About half of the corn seeds germinated, while the others rotted. Cauliflower came up quickly, and with more widespread success. Cantaloupe and watermelon did not budge from their seed form. Once the seeds got going, I transplanted them individually from the ceramic dish to small peat pots, and filled them with potting mix. I made a two tiered window sill holder for the peat pots out of scrap wood, that you can see below:



This was all going on in late March. Meanwhile, I needed a solution to get the melon seeds germinating. We were keeping our house at about 63 degrees, and I suspected the cold temperatures (especially right near the windowsill, and with water constantly evaporating from the potter) were preventing germination for warm-weather loving plants. To test this hypothesis, I built a makeshift seed germination chamber, out of a shoebox, a drop-light cord, and a 14W CFL lightbulb. I cut out a hole in the side of the shoebox big enough to screw in the lightbulb, and plugged the box into the wall. Temperatures in the box stay pretty constant in the 80s or 90s while sitting on a desk indoors. Inside the box, I put a wet dish towel, folded up, on top of a small plate. Within the folds of the dish towel, I placed the seeds. Voila! Within 36 short hours, the corn seeds were germinating. Ditto the cantaloupe and watermelon seeds within 48 hours. Within 4 days, there were 4" roots and a 1/2" stem sprouting from the corn seeds, and 3" branching roots coming from the cantaloupe seeds. This setup (shown below) became the new default seed germinator.




In the early weeks of April, there was a constant assembly line of plants coming from the ceramic dish and the seed geminator into peat pots held in two separate windowsill holders. By mid-april, there were 100 plants growing in our apartment.
The typical last frost/freeze of the season is April 27. By early April, I could tell this was going to be problematic, because the February tomatoes were rapidly outdrowing their peat pots. By mid-April, I had no choice but to transplant them (and some other quick growers, like some of the rapidly growing corn stalks)into the community garden. It appeared as though a warm period was settling in, and I hoped it would last into May and that the last frost was behind us. I had heard anecdotally that the cold is especially anathema to tomato plants.
We planted on a Thursday, and came back on a Monday to find that our plants looked much more haggard and dried out. Many looked suspiciously clipped, as though they had been eaten. Indeed, rabbits roam freely around the garden. I chased a rather plump rabbit out through the fence gate at one point, and then watched as he quickly darted back into the garden through a 1.5"!!! gap in two metal fenceposts. So the rabbits were going to get into the garden, period. We decided that a plot-level defense was our best strategy, and made use of the netting, and some stakes to render a makeshift fence. That protects from the rabbits, but there are also quails and other birds that can make their way in - and we have seen them in there. The leaves of some of our fledgling plants continue to look clipped. I also decided that relying on the default watering schedule alone was not going to work for these plants. I bought some fine mulch and laid out 1 ft. diameter rings around the base of each plant to prevent evaporation from the soil, and have been going back to the plot at least once every three days to water.
In late April, the winds came. For plants coddled indoors for over a month, this was disastrous. Day after day, winds would be sustained at 20-30 mph. The climax was a day in early May with sustained winds at 40 mph and gusts to 65 mph. The winds ravaged a lot of the plants. Some of the larger tomato plants made out quite well, as they had the time and the stem strength to weather themselves. These tomato plants especially went through a rapid change in appearance when exposed to the wind and the cold. The leaves and stems went from light green, translucent and broad to dark green, thicker, consolidated leaves, and a hard, brown stem. Watermelon plants and young cauliflower were decimated by the wind, but the cantaloupe, which was sitting right at ground level was largely unaffected. Right after the really windy day came very cold early may temperatures, including a freeze warning that yielded overnight temperatures down to 30 one night then 31 the next. I went back to the plot to find all of our melons and tomato plants completely dead. Astonishingly, though, the cauliflower had found new life, and had grown large, dark green leaves. I had planted two new rows of corn straight from the germinating box, and both of these were yielding the new beginnings of stalks. Older corn plants had some outer leaves that turned brown.




Paper cup wind shield for sensitive plants


Example of a tomato plant in late April with more weathered leaves. You can see one branch still maintained its maladaptive broad leaves, which became sickly and brown on the edges.