Cap Garden Website

The Cap Garden website links back to Ms. Devine's blog where students and teachers can post updates about the garden. The website allows us to organize our other information in one place (group calendar, wish list, compost presentation, garden map) as well as a "Days 'till Harvest" countdown tool.

Never Afraid to Cut

One of my fellow Garden for the Environment GETuP members recently turned me on to Cynthia Sandberg's Grow Better Veggie's blog. Aside from the beautiful vegetables Cynthia grows, she also has creative, inspiring yet practical ideas to use in the garden. Just as I was worrying about my gangly fava seedlings, I read her post on cutting them back in order to produce a fuller plant and voila, I had found my answer! The plants were cut down to their first nodes and left out for a couple more days while we turned their beds and added our first batch of compost. Later in the day on Friday, expecting weekend rains and mild temperatures, we planted our seedlings and here is what happened:

A Little Light

The sweet pea and fava beans that we planted indoors two weeks ago are ready to go outside and start the hardening process. They will spend their days outdoors and their nights inside with the heat off.

While this is exciting, I am a bit worried about the fava beans. They have grown tall and skinny, many of them are falling over and when I looked in to this, I found that the most likely culprit is too little light. I'm hoping that their time outside in direct sunlight will help them; but just in case, I've bought more seeds to sow on Wednesday.

CapGarden

Slideshow? No. Animoto.

Pics - Not Mine

Seedlings

Michelle, Zynal and Jr. planted seeds for sweet peas and fava beans on 2/13/09.

They were started in 4 inch containers with soil from our garden and fertilizer. The seed packets have a breadth of information which can be found here. Of course, we're going against the company's recommendation and starting our favas indoors as a result of poor timing; we had soaked the beans on a thursday and needed to plant them within 24 hours. On the 24th hour it rained and we opted for indoor planting.

Kids are tough critics of the weather.

Spring Awaits

We're about to end winter with very little rain and a lot of warm weather.  As a result, we've seen the cabbages survive a pretty intense aphid infestation without much damage and grow to five times their planting size.

The cauliflower on the other hand... dissapeared.  Literally.  We came back after a long weekend and they were gone, roots and all, lifted out of their beds by (we suspect) a well-meaning student work crew over the weekend.

We harvested a good amount of lettuce (saving about $1.00 per head by organic standards) and the pineapple sage is still standing.  

The next step is to sow our seeds and plan out for spring plantings.  The Capuchino sponsored Spring Days is in May and there has been some talk about growing food or flowers for the community and in recruiting volunteers for summer work.