Sunnyvale Teaching and Demonstration Garden

Fourth Year - December, 2009

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Overview

In 2009, the Sunnyvale Teaching and Demonstration Garden completed its fourth summer in its garden space at Sunnyvale’s Charles Street Community Gardens.We continued our popular series of free gardening classes in the garden and continued to grow seasonally appropriate, organically grown vegetables and ornamentals in our demonstration beds.

Teaching

This year our monthly free public classes covered topics ranging from the design and use of drip irrigation systems to garden bed preparation and planting vegetable seedlings to ways to renovate an aging home landscape. We taught seven of our classes outdoors in the community gardens’ growing circle meeting space. These classes were followed by rounds in our garden where class participants could see examples of what was taught in class, try their hands at techniques taught or learn about ways our project gardeners were meeting various gardening challenges. Two classes were taught in the Sunnyvale Public Library. Overall, 432 gardeners attended our nine project classes.

Demonstration Growing

We continued our year-round emphasis on growing organic, mostly edible gardens. In winter, we grew garlic, several lettuces, kales, cauliflower, broccoli and a small variety trial of
beets. We also grew kohlrabi and fennel planning to leave the plant roots after harvest in an attempt to "perennialize" them so they could provide additional harvests later in the warm season. Likewise, we extended our beet harvest by direct seeding as well as setting out seedlings at our late summer planting time.

In summer, we planted our beds with tomatoes, peppers, beans, eggplants, beets, lettuce and amaranth and included flowers in each bed planting. The flowers, zinnias, cosmos and gomphrena (globe amaranth) provided interest and beauty for the whole garden. Our seed-grown asparagus, UC157 F1, now 3 years old, was ready for selective harvesting. Spears were succulent and promise good future harvests.
The summer's harvests were plentiful, allowing us to sample what we grew and still donate over 235 pounds of fresh produce to Mountain View’s Community Services organization.

On-going Teaching and Demonstration focus

Interpretive bed signs:  The interpretive signs at each of our growing beds are utilized to explain and teach about the growing techniques, irrigation strategies, weed control and plant selection we've used there.

Cover cropping:  In both warm and cool seasons, we cover crop fallow areas to improve and protect soil. In winter we grew a mixed crop of vetches, oats and beans to improve soil structure and fertility in all beds that were not growing cool season vegetables. Then, in summer, we grew crops of buckwheat followed by cow peas in an effort to improve soil structure and fertility in our Ornamental Edibles bed after a decline in growing performance there. We’ll learn our result in the next growing season.

Interaction with the community garden and community gardeners:  Our team answered the national call to community service in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by helping several community gardeners in their own plots and by working in garden common areas. We were on hand during community garden's spring and fall plant sales to answer gardening questions and gave demonstrations of transplant care and tomato planting in spring.

Mulching:  For all the reasons to use mulch, weed control, soil moisture management, soil structure protection and more, we mulch growing beds year ‘round with well rotted compost or straw.

Attention to irrigation:  During irrigation seasons, our garden beds demonstrate correctly installed irrigation components that can deliver appropriate amounts of water to our crops. This year, we took extra effort to source irrigation components in Sunnyvale to confirm that effective drip irrigation systems did not require a trip out of town to specialty shops.

How much irrigation do tomato plants need?  This was the third year of our tomato irrigation trials. We grew two sets of tomato plants and watered them as needed after setting out seedlings in early May. Tomato varieties we grew were Carmello, Kellogg's Breakfast and Ed’s Millennium. When fruits had formed on the plants and had become about 1.5" in diameter, irrigation to one set of tomato plants was completely discontinued. The other set of tomato plants was irrigated every 7 to 14 days through the growing season. Both sets of tomato plants continued to grow, blossom and set fruit. We found that the best tasting tomato fruits came from the set of plants that were no longer irrigated. Fruits from the irrigated plants tasted almost as good and were somewhat larger. In each case, tomato fruits from our irrigation trial plants tasted much better than fruits from plants in beds that were watered weekly or twice each week. We concluded that once tomato plants are established, growing and setting fruit, they need much less irrigation than most home gardeners supply and can successfully be grown with little to no irrigation for the remainder of their growing season.

Gardening challenges we face and learn from:  Birds and squirrels offer serious challenges to both our efforts to grow plants from seed or from seedlings. Successful growing requires constant vigilance and creative barrier solutions. We demonstrate these and share them with the community gardeners.

Our once-a-week project workday schedule poses its own challenge since newly planted beds as well as producing mature crops need more than once-a-week attention. Like all gardeners, we work to share garden responsibilities.

Rhubarb is a plant we've been trying to grow for the past 2 summers. We've replaced the plant we almost immediately killed and wonder if it will have survived the winter to break dormancy and grow during the spring of 2010. We're uncertain of what factors limit our success with this plant.