Get the Veggies a-Poppin’ with Some Cover Croppin’

I’m committed to improving the soil in my spot, a spot which I’ll be stewarding for a long time, I hope. In 2014 I decided to try cover cropping, resized for the urban garden.

Green Manure is one term used to describe planting species which will improve the soil quality. They do this while they are alive by lossening the soil, adding nitrogen to the soil, and preventing weeds, and they do this when they are dead by breaking down and creating first a layer of mulch, and then compost.

Green Manure Mix
Green Manure Mix

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2014 Intruders

A few of the unwanted guests in the 2014 season.

The twin nemeses of this urban gardener. Are they collaborating in their dark ways? Morning Glories, beautiful as they are (and they are lovely to behold in the morning as they unfurl, only to close their blooms by afternoon), really have a way of sneaking into anything they can and strangling whatever grows there. Squirrels took a large share of the produce this year and last. For some reason in 2015 they found other realms to ravage. Typically they take a bite of a nearly ripe tomato or cucumber and discard it, only to do the same thing to another one and another one. Very inconsiderate.

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Twin evils of the garden in cute disguises

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2014 Food and Events

2014 was the first year that there was enough food coming in from the garden that we sometimes had more than we could eat. Witness our pole beans, of which we had a couple of pounds a week of harvest for a few weeks. We ate them, we dreamed about them chasing us, we gave them away… eventually we couldn’t handle any more.

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Bean blanchin’

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2014 First-Season Hops Harvest

By late August, I had to start thinking about harvesting the hops. Farmers apparently just cut the whole bines down. This would be efficient on a farm but probably give a few cones that were unripe, a few overripe, and plenty that were ideal. Being a two-hop kind of guy, I have the chance to take several harvests of whichever cones are ripe, separated by a couple of weeks.

Here the hops are tussling with their roommates, the kitchen herbs.

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Cascade hops, first season, mid-August

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