Gardening Report April 2, 2020

Before you start chastising us for leaving the house during the coronavirus social distancing lockdown, let me describe the park where our community garden plot is located.

Imagine a broad, lopsided pentagram.  The base is the widest line, counterclockwise from the lower right corner is the shortest border (1/10th the total circumference), the two longest lines along the top, the last border slightly longer than the shortest one.  A wide dirt footpath runs around the upper borders of the park.

It’s not an urban or suburban park.  The main road runs parallel to the base; most of the parking lots are located there.

The short border has a large drainage canal running along half its length.  There’s a small suburban neighborhood past that where most of the houses have high privacy walls for their backyards and none are closer than 20 ft. to the dirt path.

The rest of the park and path are bordered by steep but not unhikable hills.  It’s predominantly a sports park, with one area set aside for baseball / softball diamonds and the rest flat enough and well manicured enough to lay out football and soccer fields as needed (league play is suspended for the duration, of course).

There are few picnic tables and those are located near the playground area which, as one might expect, are off limits at this time.  There are other parks in our community that are more family / kid friendly and those have lots of picnic tables and more playground equipment.  Those are closed.

The dirt path around the park and the sidewalks through the parking lots total about 2 ½ miles.  It’s a good, pleasant walk when the weather is nice, or early on summer mornings before the heat rises.  As mentioned previously, joggers and dog walkers use it frequently but not in such large numbers that we all can’t stay well outside the six foot safety limit.

The community garden is located at the lower right corner, notched in by the main road and the drainage canal.  Even at our busiest non-quarantine times, there’s rarely more than two dozen people working among the 100+ plots.  Keeping a safe distance here is easy, and we’ve started having long distance shouted conversations with our gardening friends instead of getting closer.

I bring all this up to show we’re not being cavalier about our health or the health of others with our gardening.  The garden is probably the most coronavirus free place to be, what with plenty of sunlight all day and paranoid gardeners wiping everything down every time they use something.

We not only keep healthy by getting some outdoor exercise, but by growing our own food we can take a little load off stores and supply chains this summer.  We’ve planted two types of tomatoes, a variety of eggplants, and several kinds of peppers as well as a few flowers to add some color to our plot.

We need to visit our adjoining plots regularly because of the nutgrass mentioned in my last gardening report.  We try to dig them up tuber and all whenever we see them sprouting but know we’re never going to eradicate them 100% (before any of you recommend herbicides, the community garden is organic only).

Still, from our experience last year we know we can get ahead of them, and at a certain point in the early summer they go into abeyance, not springing up as often.

(They’re even rarer during the fall and winter months but will come back with a vengeance the following spring.)

Yesterday the big problem was “the girls” (as we refer to the community garden chickens).  They’re let out of their hen house in the afternoon and roam free in the garden until nightfall when they’re shooed back in.

I’d left one of the side panels resting against the support posts, not set down on the track inside it (see foto above for what I’m talking about).  They knocked it over and got inside our garden, scratching among the freshly planted crops and pecking a few leaves off one.

Fortunately, nothing serious, but we now both double check to make sure everything is sealed up properly.

Today I cut up a large plastic vinegar jug to use it to direct water in our irrigation system.

As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of sprinkler heads you can buy such as mist (sprays water in all directions in a fine mist), burblers (not a spray but a gentle flow of water in a specific spot), and others that have 360 / 180 / 90-degree sprays.

Well, are supposed to have 90-degree sprays.

I’m guessing the manufacturer figures there aren’t that many people who require precision water sprinkling so fobbing off a spray nozzle with a 120-degree range as a 90-degree will go unnoticed by most gardeners.

Not us.

We put the 90-degree sprinklers at the corners of our plots, spraying inwards, with a 180-degree sprinkler head between them and 360s and burblers in the middle.  Two of the so-called 90-degree sprinklers were spraying well outside their target area and uselessly soaking the ground outside the plot.

By cutting up the plastic jug, I was able to make a shield behind one that kept the 30 extra degrees from going outside the fence.

The other one had the whole jug placed over it upside down with a quarter of the side cut away to limit spray in that direction.

It ain’t elegant but it works.

…and that’s what passes for news in this corner of the universe today.

© Buzz Dixon