Covid-19 shut down lots of things but not Philadelphia community gardens. When lockdown orders were in place barring nonessential trips away from home, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture declared on April 17 that community gardening is an “essential” activity, exempting gardeners from stay-at-home orders as long as they wore masks and followed other protocols. The Philadelphia parks and recreation department found a way to continue offering free compost–in socially distanced piles. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society found ways to continue seedling distributions, and offered webinars in place of cancelled in-person workshops. A new PHS initiative launched in May to address food insecurity in Philadelphia, Harvest 2020, enlisted more than 10,000 gardeners, food bank volunteers and others to grow and distribute tons of produce to local food banks. The initiative created new gardens in unlikely spots, such as the Garden for Good at the Subaru Park soccer stadium. The project also teamed up with Sankofa Farm at Bartram’s Garden to build 50 backyard garden beds in West Philly.

Covid Slows but Can’t Stop Urban Ag Reform

Philadelphia was supposed to get a full-fledged municipal urban agriculture plan in 2020, but the coronavirus derailed the planning process just as it entered the homestretch. That didn’t stop the Housing Development Corp. from taking steps to address one long-standing complaint of activists: launching a new website that should make it somewhat easier to convert vacant lots to community gardens.

Revolutionary Gardeners Fend Off City

New chapters were added to long running sagas involving efforts by activists in North Philly and Kensington to wrest vacant lots from the city for gardening activities. The North Philly Peace Park,  operated by a group engaged in “a protracted revolutionary communal effort to establish, build up and defend community controlled land-based programs,” was briefly evicted by the Philadelphia Housing Authority from two vacant buildings it was renovating. They are adjacent to the lot where the North Philly Peace Park has resided, with city approval, since 2016. PHA promptly apologized for the raid, acknowledging that the group was in the midst of good-faith negotiations to buy the buildings. In Kensington, the Cesar Andreu Iglesias Community Garden, founded in 2012 by a group called Philly Socialists on several vacant, tax-delinquent lots, seemingly dodged a bid by the city to sell the lots they are occupying. Developers were offering big bucks for the lots, and were pledging to build an apartment building with affordable units. The plan by the cash-strapped city to proceed with the sale was delayed in June, and called off, at least for now, in September.

USDA Tips Hat to Philly Urban Ag

The U.S. Department of Agriculture seemed to recognize Philadelphia as a leader in urban agriculture, with an announcement in August that our city will be one of the first five in the nation (along with Portland, Albuquerque, Cleveland, and Richmond, Va.) to get a new county urban agriculture committee. County committees, operating under the auspices of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, have been around in rural America since the 1930s to allow farmers to offer input on delivery of federal services. Urban agriculture committees are a new thing, authorized for the first time by the 2018 Farm Bill. USDA urban ag committees will “work to encourage and promote urban, indoor, and other emerging agricultural production practices,” and also delve into food access, community composting, and food waste reduction.
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Vertical Gardening Entrepreneurs Arrive

Growing food crops on a commercial scale in containers in the middle of cities, a concept bandied about in futurist-urbanist circles, became a reality in Philadelphia in 2020, at least in a demonstration project and on a drawing board. In September, Second Chances Farm, a Wilmington-based vertical-farming enterprise that exclusively hires formerly incarcerated people for its farm workforce, announced plans to open a 30,000-square-foot farm in vacant buildings as part of the North Station redevelopment near the Temple University campus, with plans to eventually triple that space. That’s not all. The Philadelphia site will open satellite farms in other older industrial cities throughout Pennsylvania. That’s the big plan anyway. As for actually making it happen, on least on a small scale, cultural economist Dr. Jamie Bracey-Green beat them to it, announcing in October the launch in West Philly of Think and Grow Farms, in a converted freight container.

Pests, or at Least pest Reports, Proliferate

There were 33,015 spotted lanternfly sightings in Pennsylvania between January and July of 2020, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture—a frightful 500 percent increase from the year before (but not as harrowing as the 1,300 percent increase in spotted lanternfly sightings reported next door in New Jersey). Experts aren’t sure whether the surge in sightings reflects an increase in number of bugs, or in number of people who, locked in quarantine, have nothing better to do than count bugs and tell the agriculture department about them.

Are there other important “stories of the year” concerning urban agriculture and community gardening in Philadelphia in 2020 that I missed? Add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Netting couldn’t keep the suckers out

I think I’ve spawned a new species of squirrel in my backyard over the past five years: a species that can thrive on nothing but green tomatoes supplemented by an occasional snack of garbage.

I’ve grown tomatoes in my backyard in Philadelphia for about eight years now and in the early years, I harvested tomatoes by the hundreds. This year I planted 10 or 12 tomatoes–early girls, big boys, lemon boys, a Cherokee purple, etc.—and all that the squirrels left me was one lousy tomato no bigger than twice the size of a buffalo nickel.

I tried many ways to stave them off: fencing, netting, row cover wrapping tomato clusters like mummies, even a rat trap (which finished the summer 1 out of about 100 snaps). A feral cat that roamed the neighborhood and regularly passed through my backyard on her hunting rounds, kept the squirrels up in the trees when she was on patrol. But when she was away, the squirrels played, freely taking my tomatoes, when they had grown to medium-size and were far from ripe, just a few tomatoes a day, so that you hardly notice, until you realize none are ever getting ripe.

In the end, nothing stopped squirrels from getting every last one of my backyard tomatoes this summer.
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Next summer, I will either construct a fully enclosed, heavy-gauge chicken-wire cage for my plants, or I’ll give up trying to grow tomatoes in my backyard garden altogether.

Unless anybody can comment here about another way…

feral cat kept squirrels in trees . . .until she left

As May winds down, they’re infesting some of the trees A lot of noticeable ones are skin issues such as acne, psoriasis, eczema, dry skin and even alcohol consumption and smoking. levitra 10 mg appalachianmagazine.com A men power all lies in its sexual health and treat underlying cause. sales online viagra Impotence is something which is related to the particular communication and problem solving viagra on line skills. The emails to ignore are the vast majorities which are selling cialis 40 mg, cialis, penis enlargement drugs and other similar products and services. and weedy vines surrounding our community garden in Roxborough, but haven’t made a move on anyone’s crops, yet.

They don’t call it Merveille des Quatre Saisons for nothing. The lettuce variety, a pre-1885 French heirloom, according to the seed catalogs, can handle just about anything the weather gods throw at it. This gorgeous head of “marvel of four seasons” lettuce, see above, is one of half a dozen that sprouted from lettuce stumps that I had left for dead in my garden last fall. I didn’t notice them until early this spring when they started sprouting and then formed characteristic rosettes of loosely folded ruby-tinged green leaves.

Meanwhile, my new spring crops–including some Merveille des Quatre Saisons, several spinach varieties, and other greens–which I started in the greenhouse and moved into garden in mid-March, are thriving outside, especially those that I kept under a row cover on hoops. They’ve dodge all of the hazards the cruel world could throw at it so far, including some light freezes and tree-toppling wind storms.
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A groundhog, to be sure, could make short work of them all, and one recently showed up, happily grazing through my cilantro crop. I don’t think it’s the same one that slowly but surely ate its way through my garden last year. That groundhog (which I caught and released, though perhaps not far enough away–less than a mile from here) didn’t like cilantro. This groundhog clearly favored it over eight or ten other nearby choices. It’s going to be one of his last meals in my garden, if I can help it. I’m borrowing a trap and setting it ASAP.

Many of us noticed the unusually heavy blanket of acorns last year. Look around and I believe you’ll notice that this year, we’ve got a bumper crop of squirrels. They are already wreaking havoc in my garden, a situation that is going to have to be rectified one way or another.

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What pushed me to put an end to it was catching him in the act of climbing a couple of feet up a tomato stake, snatching a green tomato, and bounding into the woods with it clenched in his teeth. I borrowed three successively largely traps before I managed to catch him. I was told that groundhogs are fools for cantaloupe, but it took a fruit salad of cantaloupe, apples and bananas to catch my gourmet marauder. I released him in a park about half a mile away, which I later learned was probably not far enough. He hasn’t come back yet, but this year, I’ll act on the first sign that he or she or any others of their ilk are taking a fancy to my garden.

The few things that the groundhog did not touch included basil, oregano, lemongrass, peppers and the tomatoes he couldn’t reach.

One bonus was that my bumper crop of lemongrass and hot peppers got me thinking about what to do with that, and the answer was fabulous Thai curry paste (a puree of lemongrass, shallots, chili peppers, ginger, garlic, turmeric, cumin and lime zest).
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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

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

Harlequin bugs plotting conquest of Tuscan Kale crop, Aug. 16, 2014

This time last year, our community garden was overrun with a downright Biblical swarm of harlequin cabbage bugs. They destroyed everyone’s kale before moving on to other cole crops. This year, the bugs have been very few and far between – until now.

I spotted several lone bugs on Aug. 15. On the 16^th, I saw, ominously, a cluster of four.

Jill, our Garden RUN garden’s leader, sent us an email on Aug. 11 raising an alarm about “beetles, and I’m not talking Fab 4.” She warned, “Due to the cold winter, the beetles have been way late in appearing, but they are coming. Check under leaves for the double row of gray barrels (about 12-16 eggs), each the size of a pin head and drown them. Smush the adults.”

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The ones that visit our garden in Roxborough have exceptionally discriminating palate, judging from my observations. They have an unmistakable preference for kale, especially the Tuscan variety. Last year, they especially loved the nice crop of baby Russian kale that was just leafing out when they arrived. This year, everyone I’ve seen so far as been on Tuscan kale. The earlier arrivers apparently have no interest in the beautiful big Russian kale, or frilly green kale, or purple cabbage sharing the same plot.

So, how do you deal with harlequin cabbage bugs? Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

“Organic control involves hand-picking the insects off the plants (they can be dropped into soapy water to drown them) and being especially careful to remove and destroy all the eggs, which are black-and-white striped, laid in clutches of twelve.” The entry goes on the say that they are non-toxic “and can be safely fed to poultry or pet reptiles or amphibians.”

Dead cucumber, photographed on July 21, 2014

At about the same time, all of my basil plants began to turn yellow then black around the edges. Looking around the garden, I noticed the same thing happening to everyone’s basil. The basil plants in pots in my backyard, meanwhile, are as healthy as can be.

Last year in August, our entire community garden was swarmed with what must have been millions of harlequin beetles. Everyones’ kale and other cole crops were wiped out. In my backyard garden, nary a harlequin beetle showed up.

Diseased basil, photographed on July 21, 2014

All of which begs the question, are community gardens unusually susceptible to pests and diseases? Or does it just seem that way? I asked an expert, Sally McCabe, who heads a program of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society called Garden Tenders, which trains people wanting to start community gardens. This is her emailed response.

 1)  I think it’s more an issue of perception than of actual percentages. Willie Sutton said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” A greater concentration of vegetables yields more bugs.
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2)  If you’re gardening in both your backyard and a community garden, more times than not you have less sun in your yard than in the cg. More sun in summer leads to more stress, therefore more bugs & disease.

3)  Soil fertility is key. Where is the soil quality better? Yard or garden? Less soil fertility yields more bugs & disease.

4)  Where is access to water better? Better access yields less stressed plants, so less bugs & disease.

5)  Are you an observant gardener? If so, you’ll have less b & d. Garden alone, and you’ll have a consistent, probably healthy garden. Garden next to somebody who doesn’t pay attention to their plot, and their b&d will get out of control, spilling over into yours.

6)  More diversity yields less b&d. Is there more diversity in the home garden?

Luck also must have something to do with it. Sally said that last year, the CSA farm where she is a member lost all of its basil to mildew by midseason, but the basil in her yard and in her community garden plot did fine. Go figure.