Protect your garden

After our gorgeous autumn so far, it looks like cold weather is finally upon us. There is some light snow forecasted for tonight, as well as below-zero temperatures for Saturday and Sunday night.

You should harvest any sensitive veggies like tomatoes or basil and cover the garden for the next three nights with your floating row cover or a light sheet. To make things easier, you can leave your cover on until Monday. Temperatures are comfortably above zero for the next two weeks at least, so with a little protection you can keep your garden producing.

For more info, you can call in to Radio Noon today at 12:30. I will be on answering fall vegetable gardening questions. 514-597-4500 with your end of season gardening questions. See you on the radio!

And many thanks to all of you!

The end of the season is upon us, and as the leaves change colour we would like to take some time to thank all of you for another season at Urban Seedling! It has been another very busy year with a lot of exciting new projects and development. However, this growth would not be possible with all of you! A big huge Thank You to all of you for supporting us and accompanying us as we grow and change.

We are listening! We would love to hear from all of you about your season. Please include things that you enjoyed as well as things that you would like to see changed for the future. Take a couple minutes to write us a testimonial to share on our website or as a review on Facebook or google+ or simply send us an email. This feedback will be very useful for us as well we look over the season and moving forward to the next.

We are happy that lots of you have expressed interest in begin more involved in the planting process. Therefore, we are working on developing a web-based app to help with the process of creating your garden plan and the planting of your  garden. We are also developing tools to offer more structure and support for our school, daycare and corporate community garden. We are happy to announce that we will be making the move to a new seedling supplier to remedy variety shortages and crop failures. We want to thank all of you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work hard as a young family owned business to bring you the best vegetable gardening experience possible.

Production in the garden should be coming to a close. The next weeks are  a good time to head out when you have some time and harvest what you would like to eat.  If we are closing your Urban Seedling garden, garden closings will be starting on the 19th of October till the 9th of November. You will be contacted  3 days in advance of our visit.

Thank you to each and everyone one of you. Thank you for reading the newsletter, having an Urban Seedling garden or coming to our store. Thank you for being a part of the Urban Seedling community.

We have about a month left of good gardening weather in the vegetable garden. If you have leafy greens in your garden, you can get to harvesting the larger outer leaves. Leave the smaller leaves to grow. This will provide you with a continual harvest for the rest of the season.

With the return of the cool weather, keep an eye out for frost. You want to harvest any sensitive veggies before night time temperatures dip below zero. Harvest your basil, if you have a lot consider pesto as a topping for pasta, salad dressings or on baguette.

Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants need to be harvested before frost as well. Any green tomatoes will ripen on the counter as long as they don’t have any nicks or bruises. You can also make an excellent green tomato ketchup. Less sensitive plants like leafy greens and root veggies can be protected with a floating row cover or light sheet to give you an extra 3 or 4 degrees on cold nights.

Start to clean out your gardens of any dead leaves, or plants that aren’t producing anymore. If you let your coriander or dill go to seed, collect and conserve those seeds as excellent spices – or to plant again next year!

We will have garlic available for planting in the next two weeks. This should be done as you close up your garden.

This warm weather is great for your garden! We are seeing our season extended giving time for fruiting vegetables to ripen and the leafy greens to establish themselves in the garden.

You can start to harvest some leafy greens. Remember to harvest the outer leaves and leave the inner ones to keep growing. Enjoy these delicious leafy greens in your salads.

You may want to consider drying some of the herbs in your garden. I wait for a dry day that has not seen rain in the last couple days. Cut back herbs the herbs you want to harvest. You can either hang them in bunches in a dark cool place. If you have space, I like to lay out some news papers and spread them out nicely. I find they dry faster and it is less work for me. You know they are dry when they crackle under your touch. For best preservation you want to keep the herbs as whole as possible and placing them in labelled paper bags help keep them fresh longer. If you need to know if a herb is still fresh, test it with you nose! It it still smells strongly, you are good to go.

Watering is still vital at this time of year. Make sure that the water is penetrating the surface. Don’t worry if the leaves on your tomato plants are looking brown or wilted. They are putting their energy into ripening their fruit. Other plants may be showing similar signs.

The slugs are out in full force. My garden has been invaded in the last week and we have been getting photos of slug damage from other gardens. Put outbeer traps. Go out in the early morning to remove them manually from the garden. Put down diatomaceous earth around plants you want to protect. There will always be some slugs, the trick is keeping their numbers down. If the slug problem is very bad, you can purchase a product like Sluggo, or Slug B Gon. These ferric phosphate slug baits are not organic products, but are considered acceptable for use in an organic garden.

Slugs are a valuable source of food for birds, toads, raccoons, beetles and more. They are also an important part of the natural cycle in your garden. They break down organic matter recycling organic matter and contributing to the food chain. Slugs lay 20-100 eggs several times a year. The lay can remain dormant till the conditions are perfect. More so, they are hermaphrodites so they canfertilize their own eggs. 

If you have lots of green tomatoes and they are seem slow to ripen, there may be not enough air circulation. If there is lots of greenery you can prune the tomatoes (no more than 20%) to help them focus their energy into ripening their fruit. If you have powdery mildew in the garden, remember to remove affected leaves  to keep the plant going for the remainder of the season.

What the late heatwave means for your garden

Back to school usually means back to cooler weather. This week and next are unseasonably hot and dry. This has some positive and some negative impacts on your vegetable garden.

As a plus, the hot sunny weather helps to ripen tomatoes, peppers and eggplants in the garden and will serve to get you more harvest from those plants before the weather turns.  You will, however need to accompany this sunshine with extra watering.Inconsistent watering leads to cracked tomatoes and stressed plants. You want to make sure that the soil is always moist just under the surface.

Challenges include a resurgence of fungal and bacterial diseases like powdery mildewand bacterial wilt. Snip off affected leaves and spray plants with a baking soda mixture.  The leafy greens added to your garden may also be suffering. Roquette, mizuna and bok choy send up flowers and start to go to seed. To keep them producing well, simply snip these flower stalks off at their base.

Radish seeds germinate very quickly at this time of year. Be sure to thin the seedlingsto one plant every 2-3 inches.

Slug populations are robust at this time of year. It is essential to keep the area around the vegetable garden nice and clean. Pull weeds, fill in hidey-holes and overturn rocks to protect your tender new seedlings.

Replanting leafy greens for the fall

The weather is slowly shifting, the nights and mornings are cooler. This means it’s time to start thinking about replanting the garden with fresh greens for the fall. This week we received beautiful leafy green seedlings in our greenhouse. These leafy greens enjoy the cool weather and are eagerly awaiting to be planted in your gardens. A fall planting enables you to maximize your garden space and revitalize the garden. In preparation, clear out any plants you do not like, or that are not doing very well to be filled with fresh lettuce, asian greens, kale, swiss chard or radishes. We are very sad to inform all of you that we have had a crop failure with our spinach, and will not be able to offer spinach this fall. However, we have an abundance of delicious leafy greens to fill the spots in your gardens.

We are excited to come and visit your Urban Seedling gardens for the fall replants. For those Urban Seedling gardens, we will be in touch 3 days before your replant is scheduled. Once we get in touch with you,  please make sure to clean out your garden of anything that you are not happy with or that is ready to harvest and we will replace it with cool weather veggies.

The other vegetables still need your care! Remember to harvest early and often from your garden. Keep up your weeding and watering to make sure that the summer crops continue to do well. If there is to much competition from other plants (look out for those weeds!) in the garden, your vegetables will not produce. Make sure to tie up thetomatoes on your trellis and remove any branches that you are not able to get on the trellis. We do not want them shading your pepper and eggplants, they need lots of sun to produce delicious vegetables. Remember to remove any diseased leaves from cucumbers, zucchini and tomato plants. As needed spray your affected plants with a baking soda solution every 3 to 4 days to keep disease under control. Once the hot weather is over, powdery mildew will stop as well.

Remember that you  can communicate with us at any time about observations in your garden. You can send us photos at info@urbanseedling for advice on your garden. We always like to hear from you and see how your gardens are doing.

Remove peas, put tomatoes on the trellis

Now that it is hotter then H-E-double-hockey-sticks out there, your pea vines are surely past their prime. In this special edition of the Urban Seedling Newsletter, our own Shawn Manning takes you through one of our client’s garden to bring her garden back to beautiful.

In Part One, Shawn shows you that the pea vines rip out easily from the garden. Simply pull on the vine to detach it from the trellis and tomato plants as well as pulling it’s roots out of the soil.

Next, in Part Two, see how Shawn removes any pea vines that have travelled over into the bean squares. Bean vines are more fragile than the Tomato vines, so take out your clippers and cut out the pea vines from around the bean vines. A little trickier!

Part Three teaches you how to weave full sized tomato vines onto your trellis to fully take advantage of your vertical growing space. This is important to keep the tomato vines away from your other vegetables. If the tomato vines are shading out your peppers or eggplants they will not bear fruit!

And finally, The Reveal! A beautiful clean garden to finish out the season in abundance.

It is time to harvest your garlic and onions. Did you know that there is no such thing as green peppers? You can certainly harvest them green if that is how you prefer them, but if you wait long enough all peppers will change colour – usually red, orange or yellow. That goes for hot peppers as well. Ripe peppers are sweeter or hotter than their green ones.

Harvest peppers and tomatoes as soon as they change colour, cucumbers zucchini and beans early and often, eggplants, beets and carrots as soon as they are big enough. Harvest larger outer leaves of kale, swiss chard and beet greens as greens for your salad and chop herbs and roquette from the top for delicious additions to salads and cooking. Keep an eye out for the next newsletter – a harvesting video series.