Whats Up?

Here’s what’s up in the garden on the Coe Farm.  All we need is some rain and some nice sunny weather and for me to cut down a clump of big ole maple stump trees that block out the late afternoon sun on my beds.  Once all that happens, we should be picking lots of stuff from the garden.  Here’s some of that stuff.

Peas - Burpee "Sugar Snaps" with edible pods planted on March 23.

Potatoes - Bison variety from Ronniger's planted on March 11:

"Granick" onion sets put out on March 6.

 

Here are some more plants up in the Coe Farm garden.

Burpee - Sweet Gourmet Hybrid Squash Planted on April 5.

 

And these:

Burpee-Salad Fresh Spinach variety. Planted on March 25.

Aerial Shot of Coe Farm

This is an aerial shot from Google Maps that shows the Coe Farm.  It is located on the corner of Edgemoor and Coe Dr.  We rent the house to some students from Nepal and I currently use the garage and shed for storage and as a work shop for car and motorcycle maintenance.  The photo must have been taken before March 2009 because the garden plots are not visible.  I have shown the approximate positions of the garden plots with orange blocks.  The garden plots inside the fence have now been converted into two slightly raised beds to overcome the standing water problem.  I filled the raised beds with some “compost” I got from a local recycler.  Not sure what it consists of.  They told me it was manure from the zoo, grass clippings, leaves and Cargill clay, but it is not the best compost I have ever seen.   Below  is a recent ground-level photo of the raised beds and you can see a third one laid out that I plan to finish digging once we get some more rain.  Also a photo of the front of the Coe House and a photo of some Collard Greens I picked from the garden plot outside of the fence last weekend.  These greens were planted last year and overwintered under a covering of leaves.

Wichita Urban Farming: The Beginning

This  is a log of my urban farming activities.  I had many urban gardens when I lived in Kansas City in the 80’s and then in Ames Iowa when I was in graduate school in the 90’s.  Then when I graduated and moved to Texas and Maryland I did not have opportunities to garden.  In August 2008 I moved from Silver Spring MD where I lived in a house surrounded by oak trees and mountain laurel and had too much shade for very much gardening.  We moved to Wichita where land is much less expensive and forests are few and far between with most of the land being former prairie.  We purchased a home that was undergoing foreclosure and I dug a couple of beds there in Spring of 2009.  On March 8 2009 hoping to get a jump on things, I planted potatoes that I bought from Ronniger Potatoe Farms.   The variety is Kerr’s Pink Organic.  I really expected to have lots of potatoes but not even a single one came up.  I also planted the Stampede variety of  Jerusalem artichokes.  Well it turned out that I planted the potatoes on the low side of my plot, it was a rainy spring and the potatoes must have rotted in the rain-soaked soil.  The Jerusalem artichokes did great on the high-side of the garden and we enjoyed many batches of them.    We also got a few tomatoes, lots of arugula and some beets.  2009 was a “learning year” for our new Wichita farming activities.   I hope we do much better this year.

Even though the potatoes did not grow, I think Ronniger’s is a great place for buying potatoes, garlic and jerusalem artichokes.  This year I purchased four types of potatoes, 1 kind of garlic and two types of Jerusalem artichokes.

http://www.ronnigers.com/