Monthly Archives: September 2014

Best Growing Season Ever?

Harvested on Aug. 28: green onions, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, Blue Lake green beans, purple cabbage and lettuce

Harvested on Aug. 28: (left to right) green onions, Rutgers and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, Blue Lake green beans, purple cabbage and lettuce

This was just my second summer of gardening in Philadelphia, and my seventh summer in the northeastern United States after a quarter century living and gardening in Los Angeles. So I have a limited basis for comparing the growing season now drawing to a close with past seasons. I have been around long enough to know that this was an exceptionally cool and pleasant summer. But how did Philly gardeners fare this year compared with in the past?

Jill Schneider, the manager of the community garden in Roxborough where I have a plot, was certainly ebullient. In an August email to Garden RUN gardeners, under the subject line “Best Summer Ever!,” she exclaimed, “I can see that many of you are enjoying bumper crops this year…isn’t it wonderful?!” When I asked her to expound on that thought, Jill replied in early September with a ditty, titled Philly Garden Season 2014:

 Summer temps below ninety,
Garden pests were few,
Adequate rainfall,
My plants grew and grew and grew!
🙂

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Though a bug of some sort took out my cucumber vines as soon as they started yielding cukes, and my basil met an early demise due to mildew, all of my other crops were free of pests and diseases. The Rutgers tomato I planted was a bust (clearly disappointed that the muggy heat it was bred to favor never arrived), but the cool-season Early Girl thrived, producing tiny but numerous tomatoes right through the summer and into September. And the two heirloom tomato varieties I planted, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple, did quite well, by heirloom standards.

Overall, the benign growing season was reflected, I think, in the diversity of crops I was still bringing home from my little plot at the end of the summer. In late August, I was harvesting lettuce and cabbage that normally would have succumbed to the heat by early July, along with the more typical hot-season crops like tomatoes, okra and beans.

Bottom line: I can’t say whether this was the best season ever or not, but I’m very pleased with the results.

Harvested on Sept. 21: Black Krim, Ukranian Purple and Early Girl tomatoes, okra, Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder green beans, and cucumber

Harvested on Sept. 21: (left to right) Early Girl, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder green beans, okra and cucumber

False Alarm: Harlequin Beetles Bug Out This Year

No harlequin beetles in sight on kale photographed on Aug. 28, 2014

No harlequin beetles in sight on kale photographed on Aug. 28, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, I warned that a harlequin beetle invasion was imminent.  Their favored food, kale, was doomed, I said. And I had photos to prove it. Yet in a recent inspection of the indefatigable kale crop at the Garden RUN Community Garden, nary a harlequin beetle could be found. Katie Brownell, who manages Wyck Farm, was bracing for the expected invasion of beetles that had devastated her cole crops last August.  She, too, was surprised that they never came. The bitter-cold spells this past winter must have done them in, she said. Or maybe they just didn’t like the mild summer weather that most of us here in Philadelphia loved. Whatever the case. we Philly gardeners are glad they stayed away.

UPDATE – Sept. 24  Oops. They’re back, after all. But not as many as last year.  They’re swarming the kale in some plots, but not others, in contrast with last year, when everything withered before their onslaught.  And they haven’t yet discovered the kale seedlings I just planted amidst lettuce and spinach. I’m hoping a row cover will give them a growth spurt in the warning warmth and will keep that late-arriving harlequin beetles at bay until cold weather knocks them out.

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Harlequin bugs on Sept. 24, 2014

Harlequin bugs on Sept. 24, 2014

Harlequin bugs have no mercy for aging Tuscan kale, Sept. 24, 2014

Kale, lettuce and spinach, going under wraps, Sept 24, 2014

Kale, lettuce and spinach, going under wraps, Sept 24, 2014