The Auburn Community Garden

The Auburn community garden.

All produce goes to the local food bank.

This is my first blog by phone!

Late spring at the experiment station

This is my main field experiment in S. Tallassee, AL.

This field of rye is the residue of my winter cover crop, measuring about 3.5 tons per acre.

It was killed without the use of herbicides using crimp-and-roll equipment, which is why all the rye is lying in the same direction.

In order to plant in a no-till field, all the residue must lie in the same direction so that the stalks don't clog up the tillage equipment.

This is a decomposition experiment.

Nylon mesh litterbags are packed with samples of organic mulches, then either buried (to represent conventional tillage) or placed on the surface (to represent no-till).


The bags are retrieved periodically and the contents are analyzed for mass and nutrient content.

Knowing the different nutrient release rates between conventional and no till will inform farmers about how and when nutrients are released from the mulches and available to the plants.

No-till is known to conserve soil by limiting erosion, as well as conserving soil moisture, which means less irrigation. Nutrients are also released more slowly when no-till is practiced.

Spring Freeze in Alabama

Dianthus x 'Raspberry Swirl'

Just planted these about a month ago. They are doing great!























Lavendar

Planted last year, these plants are overgrowing their bed! My wife loves the blossoms. She dries them, sews them up in sachets, and puts them in with the clothes. Good stuff!
























Some of the seedlings I started a couple months ago. Lots of different peppers this year. I am determined to grow peppers.

























Hooding of the tomatoes. Temperatures dipped below freezing the other night, but I saved them!

Veggie Garden 1

I have the earliest tomato blossoms in the area this year. I inherited 6 heirloom seedlings, planted in November, that were pot bound and P starved, but i resurrected them. I saw this week that they started blooming, so i decided now was a good time to put them in the ground.

A lot of old-timers around here say to plant on Good Friday, but this year it came a bit early, so i waited a week. Hopefully, we've seen the last frost.

If all goes well, we could have our first tomatoes in May!


This is our longleaf pine, a native species to this area. Oddly, the daffodils have not bloomed yet... And i saw some blooming just down the road, too. I must've got defective bulbs.









The soils in these parts are sandy and compacted, so I built these raised beds and amended the soil since we moved in. These are onions and garlic that i planted last fall. Sometimes they get a side-dressing of spent yeast from my beer fermentations...


Here are the tomatoes I transplanted today. They don't look so tall here, but it's a good idea to prune off the lower leaves and plant the stem deep. The stems will then produce roots, giving them a stronger root system.

I gave the plot some triple 13 (13-13-13) as a starter. I'm not going to mulch the bed this year because i always have cutworm problems.


I didn't want to put this photo in because there's nothing in it, but in the interest of completeness, i guess i have to show the bed pre-plant. I did put in 3 tomatoes, tho, but you can hardly see them yet.

Winter mortalities

Well, winter killed a few of my landscaping plants, and if i don't replace them now, it'll be too late. The cold last night almost killed my tomato and pepper seedlings, and tonight it'll be just below freezing, so i had to move Alabama Days out of the bedroom to make room for our summer veggies-to-be. She'll understand come our first tomato harvest, i'm sure.