What's Up? July 11th

Dear Garden lovers,

What's up at the DIGS garden today?

If you double click on the photos below, and then choose full screen slide show on upper left you can make the photos bigger!



Activities today:

Huge thanks to those DIGS members who transplanted all the fall-winter brassicas from seed flats to cell-packs. (sorry not to be more helpful, but I actually sat on an old garden chair yesterday and it went KABLOOM, and I, guess what, hurt my sit-bones!) But huge huge thanks to our greenhouse crew.
The baby brassicas are now on an open bed in their new flats.

Garlic was harvested and hung to dry in the social shed. The scent was fabulous!

Click on his picture to make it larger to see garlic close up:



Various other early vegetables were harvested, for example:

Harvestable today:

Carrots, Kholrabi, Beets, Garlic, Lettuce, Peas, Raspberries, few Strawberries.
Please continue to eat lettuce before it bolts!

Recipes for Kohlrabi include:
- treating it like a carrot or celery stick (raw, with salt, or with dips, dressing)
- slicing it like a radish or grating like carrot for a salad or kohlrabi coleslaw
- saute-ing or steaming, then cream-saucing it or cheesing it like a scalloped potato
- add to stir-fry at end like water chestnuts
- more kohlrabi recipes
- even more kohlrabi recipes
Little Diggers:

The Little Diggers built bird houses and hung them up and also built a bird bath with hanging drip fountain - please go see this in the DIGS garden near the roses. This is fabulouso!!
Carrots were tasted, and sunflowers were measured. What a beautiful day!


Pests seen today:

Yucky prolific and furry grey Aphids (use water sprayed hard on them to knock them off) and Onion Root Maggot. Some quick research on organic controls for onion maggot suggests:

- clean out all onion plants each time you harvest; don't leave onion debris in soil.
- use diatomaceous earth around plants (I have an enormous container of this, myself, so just ask if the garden needs it.)
- interplant radish between onion rows and let the maggot infest the radish (which it prefers) and then discard the ruined radishes.
- use row covers
- avoid replanting onions in same bed for several years.

More suggestions for ridding ourselves of root maggots welcome.

See horrificly close-up (ick! :>) pest photos above in the slide show, and please call our Ladybug (yes there's only one so far, and even SHE is missing) back home so she can continue to munch on aphids as she was doing up until yesterday on the tall Lovage plant in the herb bed.

Best, Jen