Sunnyvale Teaching and Demonstration Garden

Second Year, 2007

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Project Members

Project Coordinators: DJ Deprospero & Alice Schwegman
Project Team members: Lynn Ashmall, Dagmar Cechanek, Angie Chiappa, Hazel Donaldson, Linda Eaton, Fran Grabau, Janet Hamma, Karen Hurst, Jack Kay, Agi Kehoe, Magie Klugherz, Betay Lasarow-Tozzi, Mary Ann Lipsig, Patricia Lynch, Josh Salans, Darl Spencer, Jackie Turner

Overview

Our teaching and demonstration garden is located within the Charles Street Community Garden, Sunnyvale’s public community garden. We teach monthly gardening classes in the demonstration garden, in the nearby public library or in a meeting room of the city’s community center. Gardening sustainably, using organic and other environmentally low-impact methods, is the focus of both our teaching and demonstration gardening.

Executive Summary

In its second year, our teaching and demonstration project reached over 300 members of the public with monthly gardening classes and open garden events held in the demonstration garden. Our classes covered topics ranging from design and installation of drip irrigation systems, using integrated pest management, gardening in containers, starting plants from seed, caring for soil and cover cropping to improve soil. Our classes supported water and soil conservation as well as least toxic control of garden pests. Besides growing a variety of cover crops, summer vegetables and herbs and a demonstration of water-wise, ornamental California native plants, we conducted two “backyard” trials involving tomatoes. In one, we sought another method for control of tomato russet mite buy growing a tomato plant inside a barrier that let in air and sun. As it happened, 2007 was not a good year for tomato russet mites; we never saw evidence of them in the garden. We’ll try this method again in 2008. Our other trial also involved growing tomato plants. We wanted to learn how the amount of irrigation affected tomato fruits in size, flavor and yield and get an indication of how much irrigation it takes to grow tomato fruit. We discovered that the tomatoes we watered the least had the most intense flavor. Tomato plants that were watered once per week produced fruits that won our informal weekly taste tests. For growing season 2008, we want to refine our trial and continue it, paying more attention to quantifying the amount of irrigation we use.

Details

Our growing area consists of four 4’x16’ raised beds, seven in-ground annual beds, two beds of ornamental, perennial California native plants and a collection of edible and ornamental plants growing in containers.

Our raised beds (RB) were planted to themes:
• RB#1 is in the shady margin of the garden. It was planted with eggplants, runner beans and peppers. After the first double dig and amendment with composted green waste, no other inputs were made. Inadequate sun and limited soil amendments severely limited this bed’s production.
• RB#2 was planted as a “food for a family” bed and grown using no animal products. Nitrogen sources included spent coffee grounds donated by coffee shops and alfalfa pellets. Other soil amendments included home-made compost and a rotting straw mulch. The beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and beneficial flowers grew well and were very productive. This “vegan” bed held its own in terms of vigor and production.
• RB#3 was planted in perennial edibles including an artichoke, rhubarb, asparagus and strawberries. None of the plants flourished. We thought the main limiting factor for them was a lack of organic material in the garden bed’s soil. We are mulching with a compost of well-rotted horse manure and wood shaving bedding material. We’ll lift plants to dig in more compost, in an effort to increase the ratio of organic material.
• RB#4 was planted as a high-density tomato, beans, and sunflowers bed. Twenty tomato plants, 3 bean plants and 3 sunflower plants were planted in the space. All the plants grew poorly and the tomato fruits had little flavor. This planting density proved to be too high!

Our 4 raised beds clearly illustrated the impact of ample soil amendments, of almost any kind, along with a hands-on gardening approach as illustrated by RB#2. It was easy to show our community gardeners and other visitors to the garden that plants will thrive with the right attention.

Our seven in-ground beds were used to grow blueberries, our tomato irrigation trials plants, runner beans, peppers, russet mite prevention trials, herbs and okra. One bed was dedicated completely to growing edibles with ornamental qualities and ornamental plants that are edible. For beauty and ease of care, the Ornamental Edibles bed too the summer’s prize (if we were awarding one). The gardeners installed a home-made tower and planted scarlet runner beans, hyacinth beans, cardinal flower and Mina lobata to climb over it. The garden also included chives, gem marigolds, daylilies, lettuce and kale. It was beautiful and we could eat it! For the public, it was a great illustration of pleasing garden design with edibles incorporated in an esthetic way. The Paisley Bed was home to one of our summer “backyard trials” to see if tomato russet mites could be excluded from the garden with a physical barrier. We planted 3 Stupice tomatoes and surrounded one of them with white, non-woven agricultural fabric held in place by 4 6-foot tall T-posts. The other two plants were grown in the open and only one of them would be treated with sulfur spray, if and when evidence of russet mites was seen on the plants. The three plants grew well but no russet mite evidence was seen on any of them. We’ll conduct this “trial” again in summer of 2008 to continue looking for an answer.

Tomato Irrigation “Backyard” Trial

In an effort to find out if tomatoes could be “dry farmed” in a home garden or, rather, how much irrigation good-tasting tomatoes need, grew tomatoes using 3 different watering regimes. We planted 3 pairs of tomato plants, Early Girl, an early standard-sized tomato, and Ed’s Millennium, a long-season beefsteak tomato. All the tomato plants were planted with compost and Dr. Earth vegetable 5-7-3 fertilizer as soil amendments. And they were mulched with 3-4” of compost.

The seedling plants were established by hand watering twice/week over a two week period. Then, one pair was watered once/week, another pair twice/week for the remainder of the growing season. The third pair was watered once/week until fruits 1.5” in diameter were set. Once fruited, the third pair of tomato plants were not watered again.
The irrigated pairs of tomato plants were irrigated with drip irrigation. The once-weekly pair receiving approximately 6.5 gallons of water/week and the twice-weekly pair receiving approximately 14.5 gallons of water/week.

All six plants grew well and looked quite similar in size and flowering in spite of their irrigation differences. By 6/26/07, the plants’ first fruits were 1.5” in diameter and watering was discontinued for the “dry” pair. During late July and August, we tasted the fruits harvested and found the twice-weekly tomatoes to be large, watery and tasteless. Tomatoes watered once-weekly were the over-all taste winners while the “dry” tomatoes were preferred by some for their intense flavor, in spite of their thick skins. The number of fruits produced by each plant didn’t seem to be affected much by the irrigation treatment. However, irrigation amount markedly impacted the weight of the fruits with the twice-weekly watered fruits weighing about double the “dry” tomatoes.
Visitors to our garden, for our classes and other garden activities, were very interested in our irrigation experiments. All were completely amazed to see how beautiful and robust the “dry” pair of plants were, even in late August, and most were similarly amazed to hear us endorse the flavor of once-weekly watered tomatoes over the usual home-grown twice-weekly watered tomatoes.
By the end of summer, we thought we’d like to try this experiment again in 2008, finding some way to better quantify the amount of water we used to grow the tomatoes. We thought we might also try to find a more objective measure of the fruits’ taste.