How Does Your Garden Grow?

By Elizabeth Sonifrank, Community Kitchen Garden Research Intern, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

*** Click on the image to see the graph in a larger format.

We are now starting into our third month of harvesting here at the Lewis Ginter Community Kitchen Garden. We have delivered a large variety of vegetables to FeedMore, totaling 3,600 pounds of fresh produce as of August 9. This is over 1/3 of our 10,000-pound goal at about halfway through our production season. Our total production is trailing behind the previous 2 years, partially due to the very wet summer we have had. This is also due to a decrease in the total number of tomato and zucchini plants this year. We needed to reduce the amount of space dedicated to those two plant families (Solanaceae and Cucurbitaceae) in order to implement a proper crop rotation cycle. Although we’ve reduced the scale of those two plant families, we’ve grown a larger variety and quantity of other vegetables.

Our yield stars this season seem to be the cherry tomatoes and eggplant. We have delivered over 400 pounds of cherry tomatoes in the past 6 weeks (listed under tomatoes in the graph below). Our eggplant are just getting started, and we have already taken 528 pounds over 5 weeks.

*** Click on the image to see the graph in a larger format.