More Food and Organic Garden Update!

Today, about 1/2 pounds of green onions were harvested from the garden. The Onion greens can be harvested continuously through the summer and early fall. After which the underground Onion tubers can be extracted with a final harvest. I had intended to plant some more herbs such as basil and thyme, but didn't quite get the time to do so. In the rest of the garden, much has transpired. Almost all of the crops are flowering, making the garden look like a giant series of flowering bushes.


The early and mid season potatoes will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks. The late season potatoes will be ready within 4 weeks. The idea here is to stagger the planting of a secondary crop of potatoes into 3 phases, which would result in another 3 harvests later this year. One troubling thought is the effect of the potato harvests upon the surrounding bean plants, since the beans have formed a symbiotic relationship with the potatoes, the removal of the taters may make the beans more susceptible to pests.

The crop trinity in Garden Bed one is doing very well, the Eggplants are flowering profusely and will soon bear fruit. The pole beans have climbed up each and every corn stalk and are also flowering like crazy. Everything is so tightly integrated that this network of crops looks as if it's a single, complex plant. The corn stalks have sent up strong stalks with broad emerald leaves, the beans clamor along the sides of those stalks, and the ground beneath is entirely covered by eggplant leaves, not a square inch of sunlit space is wasted by this system. The corn/bean combination I think can be left there until the end of the agricultural season this year. The beans will produce until October, and the corn will be ripe by then as well. The eggplants after the august harvest may be turned under the soil and replanted with either sugar beets or winter kale. I plan to seed Garden bed one with some other leafy vegetable combination next year, and if the gods are kind, another intensive crop of potatoes the year after to form a full rotation.

Garden update and First Harvest!!!!

Today, we harvested the lettuce heads from the garden. They have developed into very large and tall green structures, replete with rich green leaves. Of the 9 saplings that I started indoors, 6 of them made it to the garden bed, and 5 of which survived into maturity. Each head of lettuce is between 2 to 3 pounds in weight. Overall around 14 pounds of lettuce was harvested. The lettuce heads were quite leafy, and free from much pest damage. Apparently, the dragon flies have really done their jobs over here. The surprising point to note here is that the overall space that the lettuce took was about a quarter of a garden bed, or roughly .25 square meters. There is perhaps more than a month worth of salad greens here for one person.


The area in garden bed 2 that was previously devoted to the lettuce crop was immediately sown with an Northern Indian variety of Lentil seeds and covered with leaf mulch to conserve moisture and to prevent soil erosion. The lentils will mature and yield a continuous harvest through summer and early fall, after which it'll be turned over and replanted with beets and/or turnips for an early winter harvest in November. Thus a continuous and intensive flow of foodstuffs out of the garden can be provided from March to November. What is more miraculous is that such a small area of soil will be able to maintain it's fertility while producing so much food.

In other areas of the garden, several crops are getting ready to produce. The Onions will be ready for a continuous harvest within a week. The early maturing Roten Red Potatos will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks. All of the potatoes will be harvested within 4 weeks and a second potato crop would need to be sown for an early October harvest. The tomato plants are producing dozens of small green tomatoes at this point. Maturation of those tomatoes will occur beginning in July, thus providing a continuous tomato harvest until early October. The beans, I'm not expecting to see a crop until mid July at the earliest. The eggplants will be even later.

Now that my organic garden has entered it's primary production phase, I have been expecting a good deal of damage from the usual depredations of marauding children. And so far they have not failed to live up to expectations. Several days ago, someone passed by the garden and tore up 2 corn plants and incurred significant damage to 3 potato plants. Thus 10% of my corn crop is now lost. It was obvious that this person had intended to kill the potato plants as well. One thing that I have observed however is that Potatoes are extremely hardy, within 3 days, the significant leaf damage done by the trespassers have been completely repaired by the plant itself, all 3 of the damage potatoes have fully recovered. For the gaping areas left by the corn plants, chick pea seeds were immediately sown as a cover crop and leaf mulch applied at once. The chick peas be ready for harvest around August. There needs to be some measure of security for the garden to prevent future human raiders.

A mid-summer night's post

It has been a while since my last post. Much has happened in the meantime. I moved into a major city and started some indoor miniature gardening efforts there. I came back to the suburbs today to check on my organic garden beds. It appears that much has transpired in the last 3 weeks. The garden is at last beginning to resemble a miniature jungle, complete with a multi-tiered vegetation canopy. There has also been a degree of pest damage in some areas, but nothing too severe.


Garden Bed 1 has developed into a robust crop "trinity" system. The corn stalks have grown up very well. The pole beans are sending intricate tendrils up and around the cornstalks, using them as a living support structure. The eggplants have grown much larger as well, spreading out to cover most of the exposed surface area between the beans and corn plants. The entire "design" is incredibly efficient. The corn supports the beans by providing a super-structure, the beans support eggplants and corn by fixing nitrogen into the soil, and the eggplants serve both corn and beans by providing ground cover which conserves soil moisture. What is more amazing is that corn, beans, and eggplants, provide carbohydrates, protein, and vitamins respectively: the necessary components of a complete nutritional diet. The corn and the beans are remarkably free from disease. However, upon closer examination one can see that the eggplants have suffered a degree of damage from black flea beetles. All of the eggplant leaves were perforated with small holes made by the beetles. The significance of the damage seems to have been mitigated by some dragon flies. These young dragon-flies were hovering like attack helicopters over the eggplant leaves, every once in a while one of them would swoop down and capture a flea beetle for lunch.


Garden Bed 2 is developing along similar lines. The tomatoes have grown to be twice as tall as they were during my last post. The Lettuce heads have developed into huge(basketball-sized) plants, they should be ready for harvest within several weeks. The pole beans have grown up and around the bamboo and metal scaffolds, as well as around the tomato plants themselves. The onion chives have grown to be over a foot tall. The tomatoes, pole beans, and onion chives seem to be flowering at the same time. As such, large numbers of bumble and honey bees were flying around Garden Bed 2. Overall, there does not appear to be any significant pest damage in Garden Bed 2.

Garden Beds 3 and 4 have turned into complete jungles. The Potato plants in those beds have grown to be over 4 feet high. Pole beans have managed to climb up every single bamboo support pole, and several of the potato plants themselves. Large portions of the ground layer of both beds seem to be carpeted by lush green onion chives blades. Both of these beds have become edible jungles of sorts. The potato/bean/onion combination seemed to have warded off a great deal of pest damage. I'm seeing the usual assortment of pest insect characters, but their effects have so far been quite minimal upon these two beds.

As I'm writing this entry, I can't help but marvel at the incredible level of bio-diversity that has developed in this "perma-culture" garden . Last year, I was impressed that there seemed to be several times more insect species in the one garden bed than generally found on the lawn. This year, there seems to be an order of magnitude increase in the variety of insect species found in my garden. It is particularly contrasting as this side-by-side picture demonstrates between the jungle-like organic garden and the savanna-like lawn.

I looked at every tier of the canopy system, and took careful notes of the species seen there. And here is what I found:

Ground Surface Tier
Centipedes, Pill Bugs, Mole Cricket, Snails

Ground Cover Tier (onion chives, green onions, herbs)
Caterpillars, Grasshoppers, Ants, Praying Mantis, Weevils, Fireflies

Intermediate Canopy Tier( Cabbages, Potato/Tomato stems, Bean tendrils)
Potato Bugs, Japanese Beetles, Fruit Worms, Moths, Army Worms, Spiders, Soldier Bugs, Lady Bugs, Orius Bugs, Cucumber Beetles, June Beetles

Leaf-top Canopy Tier( Tomato/Potato/Eggplant/Pole Bean leaves)
Aphids, Flea Beetles, Gnats, Green Lacewings, Flies, Leaf Beetles, Dragon-Flies, Honey Bees, Bumble-Bees, Wasps, Fruit-Flies, Leaf Hoppers, Leaf Worms, Midge-Flies

A total of 37 insect species were easily identified in a Garden whose total surface area is barely 6 Square Meters. Conversely, I did a similar examination of the mowed lawn just a few feet away, and came up with a total of 3 insect species(ants, grasshoppers, fireflies). Such a disparity was quite shocking to me. The lawn, in ecological terms, is akin to a barren desert compared to the Garden.

Imagine this, we spend precious fossil fuels in the forms of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and lawn-mowers to create a nearly life-less desert in our backyards. The lawn produces nothing, but takes constant and massive amounts of energy to maintain. We should all be trying to turn our backyards into garden ecosystems, free food and an abundance of wild-life beats wasting gas and money any day of the week!