The Dog Days Arrive at My First Community Garden

Morning, everyone!
Diane Tunick Morello here

The dog days of summer arrive. With temperatures forecast to climb over 90 degrees today, I pack my coffee, garden stakes, water and rooted scallions and head to the Bible Street community garden first thing in the morning. 

Seven o'clock is the perfect time to visit the garden. I am curious to see whether Thursday's torrential downpours caused damage. Glad to say, no. I want to wrap up by eight o'clock -- before the heat takes over and before I head to the Families Belong Together rally at Greenwich Town Hall on June 30.

Here's what's happening in the garden: 

• Tomatoes thrive, with strong stalks, lots of yellow flowers and small and midsize fruit popping. Thinning out the stalks on Tuesday helped. Two "volunteer" tomato plants -- remnants of the previous gardener -- display flowers and produce fruit. My husband, PJ, was so impressed with the tomatoes throughout the community garden he now looks forward to getting his own plot new year.

Green bell pepper emerges

• The jalapeño pepper seems to have grown six to eight inches in five days, thanks to reorienting the tomato plants and opening the pepper to sun. I see no fruit yet on the jalapeño, but two big fruit emerge on the bell peppers.

• Oh, the carrot fronds, what to do, what to do. The fronds tower over plants and herbs, cutting off their light and air. Chop-chop go the fronds, yank go the wandering carrots. The plants and herbs now get sun.

• Cucumber and patty-pan squash flourish as they reach to the sun. Tiny basils, planted as seeds in mid-May, are starting to emerge from the soil. Meanwhile, basil seedlings I got from Garden Education Center of Greenwich fare well, strengthening and growing taller.

• Only one plant fares poorly, my green beans. A week ago a gardener suggested I remove the wire frame from the bush beans. When I did, the beans came up with the frame. I tried to replant and reattach, but I fear I caused irreparable damage to the fragile beans.  

Before I leave the garden, I water my plot and Maud's plot. I met Maud on my first day and I have enjoyed seeing her garden flourish, filled with plants so different from mine.   

Early morning sun illuminates the green
at the Bible Street branch
of Greenwich Community Gardens

The 92 plots in the community garden are lush and healthy. A treat of being a community gardener is wandering around and seeing plants in other plots. Early sun glints off hundreds of tomato plants throughout the community, the sunflowers rise, the lettuces grow a foot or so and the peas and beans climb hand-made ladders. I expect to visit the garden possibly three or four times a week in these dog days of summer, watering, thinning and harvesting. I look forward to meeting other gardeners, admiring their plants and maybe sharing tips and tastes of what they have grown. 

As I head to Families Belong Together in Greenwich during the same week we honor Independence Day, I thank my grandparents for having the courage roughly one hundred years ago to emigrate from Poland, Russia and Austria and build their futures -- and my parents' future and my future -- in America. We all yearn to breathe free. 

Our Statue of Liberty:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled massesyearning to breathe free." 

The Day I Learned About Garden Pests

Green abounds at Greenwich Community
Gardens' Bible Street branch

Hi, community gardeners! It's Saturday, June 23, and the Bible Street Community Garden, part of Greenwich Community Gardens, is lush and green. Lettuces flourish, tomato plants grow taller, sunflowers reach for their zenith and spring veggies head for salad bowls and dinner plates. Tonight we have a community garden potluck dinner. I arrive at 4:30pm, and other community gardeners trickle in over the next hour. Potluck at the community garden means more than buying food, it means making or baking dishes others can enjoy, preferably with organic vegetables.

Terri Browne Kutzen (right) welcomes
Steve Conaway from Greenwich Land Trust

Terri Brown Kutzen, co-director of the Bible Street Garden, welcomes our guest speaker, Steve Conaway, a conservationist at Greenwich Land Trust. Steve walks through the garden, pointing out good bugs (ladybugs), bad bugs (miner beetles) and other pests. All of them want to eat our veggies as much as we do. In some plots, the bugs have done serious damage to chard, broccoli and eggplant. Miner beetles burrow through the leaves of chard, aphids appear on tomato leaves, wasps lay eggs inside other aphids (can you say Alien), and ladybug larvae make their appearance. Ladybugs are good insects. They eat the bad insects. 

Steve Conaway finds aphids on tomatoes
as Jay and Gary look on

Steve walks from bed to bed, examining what's working, what needs thinning, what's being eaten and what's kaput. One gardener has a giant broccoli plant that has been shredded by bugs. The verdict? Get rid of the plant at the roots. Another gardener has a bed filled with luscious pea vines, but when you look at the pods, they all have been scalloped with bite marks from chipmunks.

Steve graciously agrees to visit my garden. Healthy and dense, he says. He suggests that my tomatoes (growing profusely, thank you) may be stealing sun from the bell peppers and jalapeño peppers. I reorient the tomatoes to open up  sunlight over the peppers. As for tomatoes, I thin out lower branches and leaves so the plant's energy goes to the fruit.

This week I plan to bring my husband, PJ Morello, to see the community garden. He hasn't seen it since mid-April. What a transformation he will see! 

The Day I Begin to Turn Over Early Plants at the Community Garden

The full community garden flourishes,
as do my tomatoes in the foreground 

Early Saturday, June 16, sun shines brilliantly on the Bible Street arm of Greenwich Community Gardens. Four or five people kneel by their garden beds, three or four more than I usually see during my early morning visits on weekdays. Looking at the weather forecast, I see sun, sun, sun. Good for the plants. Sun is not my friend, however, so I visit the garden early or late and I wear pants, hats and heavy layers of SPF skin protection.

I scan the whole community garden, and all the beds are flourishing. One gardener grows lettuces in parade-like rows, another cultivates sunflowers, another trains her beans to climb string ladders, and still another plants a tangle of tomatoes and nothing else. When our rain-delayed community social finally unfolds next week, I will wander the garden and take note of things to try next year.  

Progress is rapid in garden bed A6. 

• The tomatoes are heightening. One cherry tomato plant puts out yellow flowers, and small tomato globes form on another. The runt cherry is healthy, short but thriving. 

Bell peppers form flowers

• Bell and jalapeño peppers flower (grow, grow, I whisper). I notice that the tomato plants block the peppers' light in the morning. If I visit in the late afternoon or evening, I suspect the peppers will be drenched in sunlight. Worth watching for next year: Leafy tomato plants impinge on the growth of other vegetables.

• Four patty-pan squash mounds, planted in late May, take off. Soon I must stake them. Patty-pans normally spread outward. The density of my garden bed suggests that I must train them to grow upward. Good luck with that.

A small yellow flower peeks out
between the cucumber bushes 

• My string beans and cucumbers are flourishing. The beans do not yet twine around the wire frame, but soon. The cucumber bush hybrids are healthy. I place a wire frame around them so they grow upward.

As I admire the healthy vegetables, I take stock of the vegetables and plants that fare poorly. 

• The carrots are cramped and overgrown. Green fronds abound, but when I pull out a few carrots to thin out the crowd, I find skinny, anemic wannabes. Lesson learned: Don't overcrowd, and thin out aggressively.

• Of the half-dozen beet seedlings I planted in April, only one grows. What will I do with one beet? No matter. The beet is a bust -- leaf, but no beet. I could use some tips for beet success.

• I plant three basils from Garden Education Center of Greenwich. I volunteer in the GEC greenhouse on Friday, where I help cultivate the basils as they grow from seeds to seedlings to plants. Between the new basils and the basil seeds I planted in May, maybe I will get too much basil. Nah. Never too much basil.

• Weeds are doing well, sorry to say. I kneel on the perimeter and yank three-leaf clover-like weeds, delicate and prolific, they grow intertwined with carrots, lettuces and radishes. Is this a symbiotic arrangement or a parasitic arrangement? Anyone know? 

Diane Tunick Morello
near Steamboat Basin geysers and gurglers
on the northeast shore of Lake Yellowstone

Until next time, what flourishes in your community garden? What do you discover is a bust? What will you do differently next year? 

Ciao for now --

Diane Tunick Morello

The Day I Return to a Riot of Growth in My First Community Garden

I stand before the Snake River
at Oxbow Bend in Jackson Hole, WY

In full sun on Friday, June 8, I visit the Bible Street Community Garden after taking a soul-inspiring trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks in Wyoming. The scale and majesty of the two national parks are humbling, with breathtaking beauty around every corner. The wide open spaces differ dramatically from the tree-lined perspectives, dense development and heavy traffic in Connecticut. People from the west say they get claustrophobic in the east. I feel that way, too. When I go west, I feel as if I can breathe. 

My first view of the riot of growth

After two weeks away, my garden bed at Bible Street Community Garden is a lush riot of greens, tomato flowers and weeds. I am thrilled -- more accurately, shocked -- to see the overflowing garden bed. Everyone should leave for two weeks and come back to this! All the plants were tame when I left for my trip on May 25. When I visit on June 8, they are out of control -- and I mean that in a good way. 

• Huge radish greens rise in my first row, a tangle of immature carrot greens surrounding them. 
• Hybrid bush cucumbers grow healthily in the second row. 
• Four patty-pan squash mounds in the third and fourth rows are sprouting. I must train them to grow up rather than spread out. 
• Green beans are growing. I can't wait to see the pods.
• My four tomatoes are growing and starting to flower! We can never have too many tomatoes, as my husband reminds me.
• The basil seeds I planted before my trip have not yet sprouted. I will grow the seeds at home next year, then transplant them to the garden.
• Three giant unknowns I did not plant are starting to act like umbrellas in the garden, blocking the sun for plants I do want. Out they go. (Community gardeners, can you identify the tall greens in the lower left and top right of my garden bed in the photo above?)

Trimmed and thinned a bit

Leaning on my knee pad, I move block by block along the edge. I trim the delicious arugula and pledge to plant more next year, lots more. I try to figure out why the full block of beet seedlings I planted in April now yields only one rose-colored beet. I thin out the radish greens, admiring the gorgeous red globes and wincing at the ones sacrificed to critters. (Note to self: Plant radishes deeper next year.) I snip my vibrant parsley. Then I liberate three healthy scallions I started on my windowsill, transplanted in the garden and will reroot on my windowsill in the next few days.

I bring a big bowl from home to collect my bounty and quickly discover the fresh greens overwhelm the bowl. (Gotta say, I'm loving this!) I grab a large box from my trunk and head back to the garden bed. I now have ample room to collect scallions, which I will cut into pieces and put on salads and chili; radishes, which I will clean, trim and leave on the counter for munching; parsley, which I will wash, trim and chop for chimichurri; and arugula, which I will wash and rewash before mixing with EVOO and balsamic for a peppery home-grown salad. (How does arugula get so sandy in topsoil?)

The garden manifests on my counter 

I feel like a schoolgirl coming home with her report card and wanting everyone to see. Look, mom, I got an A+ on my garden! I wash the greens in the kitchen sink and then lay them out -- so fresh, so colorful. Very exciting! To fellow newbie community gardeners, this is the thrill we wanted, right? To experienced community gardeners, I get it!

Final note: I've been meeting new people through this blog. So glad to know you, and pleased to have you join the conversation of community gardening! Give me a shout out in the blog. Let me know who you are and where you live in the community garden.

Until next time, I leave you with two photographs of Yellowstone National Park, both shot within the past week. Scroll down. Blow up the snaps on your screen to get the detail. I also add a reflection of the grandest Grand Teton mountain as my new blog background. Enjoy! 

-- Ciao, Diane Tunick Morello

Rainbow shines over Yellowstone National Park's
northern entrance in Gardiner, MT, June 1, 2018 

Minutes past sunset on the northern shore of Lake Yellowstone, June 5, 2018