Nov 11th, 2011

Still Truckin’

by Albert Brian Vick Community Kitchen Garden Coordinator, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

We’re still truckin’ along in the Lewis Ginter Community Kitchen Garden. Although it’s now nearly a week into November, the broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower are not quite ready to harvest en masse. We harvested 26 pounds of beautiful broccoli and cabbage on October 31st, but only the few that were fully ready. The recent spate of relatively cold nights is retarding growth, but these vegetables should mature in the next couple of weeks as the weather warms a little. Today our nice group of volunteers focused on liquid feeding the crops with fish emulsion, dividing and transplanting some kale, and garden clean up. The volunteer crew included three generations of the Hooks family.

The mature zucchini plants showed nominal signs of frost burn, but it was clear the row cover fabric wouldn't suffice for any more sub-freezing nights.

We ended our “fall zucchini trial”, as the sub-freezing nights had burned most of the plants. The experiment was based on expecting the row cover fabric to add ten degrees to the zucchini bed air temperature, but the fabric wasn’t enough. I bet clear sheet plastic would have made the difference. We would be at the flowering stage by now, with daytime temps still warm enough for the bees to do their work.