Celery for Soup
Chef Angelo cutting celery from the Garden to use in a delicious turkey vegetable soup for the Museum’s Big Red Room Cafe. This celery was planted late last summer and grew through the winter under our plastic-covered hoops. It is not blanched white like celery you purchase at the grocery store, making the flavor much stronger.
Spring in the Permaculture Garden
Look what’s flowering in our permaculture garden! Permaculture is a design practice that seeks ways to mimic natural systems in order to maximize sustainability and productivity and minimize upkeep. The Museum’s permaculture garden features fruit trees and shrubs, native flowers and edible and medicinal herbs. To learn more about permaculture, visit Pittsburgh Permaculture. Look at what’s blooming!
Native Columbine
Stone crop
Strawberry patch!
Kindergarten students from Allegheny Traditional Academy hunts for strawberry flowers.
Highbush blueberry. The rabbits chewed them down last fall, but they survived! The last few days of cold was hard on some of the flowers.
One of two little paw paw trees! Paw paws are the largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States.
Lamb's ear is undubitably soft
Winter Harvest
Here are some hearty greens! The Garden grows in four seasons, and today we had a gorgeous harvest of green lettuce, lettuce mix, and rainbow chard. The lettuces and salad mix will be used in the wraps in our cafe, and the chard will likely end up in a soup. The Garden benefits from a micro-climate, which means that because it is surrounded on three sides by stone and concrete walls, which radiate heat from the sun long after it sets, and act as barriers from wind. It’s also south-facing, which is important to ensure enough winter sun for growing. Our hoop houses are built using some simple materials: metal rebar hammered into the ground, with hollow, flexible PVC gas pipe bent into a half-circle over top, then covered with a sheet of plastic held down by bricks or rocks. You can build your own hoop houses at home by purchasing these simple materials from your local hardware store! Click on any photo to see it larger.
Lettuce!
Salad Mix
- Red Leaf Lettuce
Mache- perhaps the prettiest salad green!
It looks painted!
Arugula
Fistfulls of greens! This was about 1/4 of the harvest of chard.
Elegant Eggplants
You couldn't buy this in the grocery store if you wanted to! Rosa Bianca is an Italian heirloom variety eggplant we have growing here at the Museum; we purchased these seedlings from Garden Dreams Nursery in Wilkinsburg. They are a creamy white with light lavender stripes, and oh-so beautiful. It is described to taste sweeter and have a creamier texture than traditional purple/black varieties. We shall see!
This is an Asian variety called "Little Fingers". This guy was hiding under the big bushy plant the whole time it was growing, playing hide and seek!
Nice camouflage, "Louisiana Long Green". This is another Asian variety that is a lovely lime green color.
We also have a Turkish Orange variety that’s coming in soon. The Garden is bursting with colorful flowers; the zinnias are a deep red, the calendula a sunny yellows, nasturstiums have donned a firey orange, and dainty cosmos in pretty pink and purples. These flowers add a lot of beauty to the garden, but also draw beneficial insects, especially ladybugs, that eat the insects that munch on all our herbs and veggies. We are gearing up to seed our fall crops–among other things, lettuces, spinach, cilantro, beets, carrots, radishes, and maybe we’ll squeeze some pole beans in this week and see how fast they can climb. The kale, broccoli and cauliflower are being champs in this hot summer heat, they are unusually happy and healthy despite the humidity. I have been dreaming of Brussels sprouts, but they haven’t formed a stalk yet. The celery has been buried by the zinnia forest, we will see how well it does hidden!
A zinnia forest! This is my first year growing zinnias, and I didn't realize some varieties are mini-shrubs. There are snapdragons, cosmos, parsley and celery buried beneath!
Rainbow Swiss Chard is a nice plant to try if you are a beginner gardener. It typically doesn't suffer from disease, and produces prolifically. It's lighter than kale but heartier than spinach. Delicious!
The tomato jungle, prefaced by a patch of Black Eyed Susans.
The first crop of Black Cherry tomatoes! Known for having a rich, complex flavor.
Lots of baby eggplants, growing up so fast. In this photo you can also find zinnia, celery, and flax seed.
Propel Homestead in the Garden
Recently a class from Propel Homestead visited the Garden. They harvested and ate our carrot crop, dipping the sticks in ranch and hummus. They also picked and ate spring peas, broccoli, sorrel and mint, and watered and explored, finding lots of different bugs!
Learning about stevia, the plant that tastes sweeter than sugar!
- Harvesting the carrots that were planted by our afterschool program in December. “Don’t pick that one, it’s a tomato plant!”
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Bumpy carrots The students were able to try a carrot stick in hummus and one in organic ranch dressing. They also learned the ingredients that were in each dip before they ate it.
Green Everything
Young peas getting ready to climb!
These were donated by "Who Cooks for You Farm", some wonderful people who grow gorgeous organic food.
YA put these mustard greens in a few weeks ago. The plants were started indoors by one of our exhibits staff.
Carrots that YA seeded last December, that grew slowly through the winter under a hoophouse, but are growing over an inch a week!
Carrots and Radishes
Zakee, Sarah and our Chatham teacher Dale plant carrot and radish seeds.
It seems a little cold to be planting seeds, but there are a lot of plants that will grow through the winter if they are given a little insulation. Granted, we are planting them a bit later than is usually best, but I’ve been amazed at how resilient seeds are, so there’s a chance they will come up. Our YouthA.L.I.V.E. afterschool program here at the Museum is exploring Garden programming with Graduate students from Chatham University’s new Food Studies program. The teachers have been wonderful, and the middle schoolers are excited to pick, taste and plant in the Garden. This is our prototyping for public programming (the programs that are developed for all museum visitors) come spring, so when you visit us there will be many garden activities for you to do! We shall see if these carrots and radishes do indeed germinate….
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
In the Garden, one of our biggest pests has been imported cabbageworms, that begin as tiny yellowish dots on the underside of cabbage-family plants, become so small they look like little green lines, and plump up into chubby, soft green caterpillars as they feast on your prized plants. Over the last two months, I have found at least ten of these a day on our handful of cabbage and broccoli plants. If you let them go for a few days, they can decimate young plants down to nil.
You can see the holes of where it ate lunch....
A few simple control methods:
*Plant flowering annuals. These attract beneficial insects that eat the larvae.
*Use a butterfly net to catch the butterflies (white with black dots) before they lay their eggs, which will hatch into the caterpillars.
*Hand-pick off any eggs or caterpillars you see, and dump them in soapy water. If you happen to have chickens, you can try to feed them the caterpillars as grub!
*Cover your plants with row covers. This will effectively prevent the pests, but will make your garden less visible and attractive.
Red or purple cabbage varieties make the green guys easier to spot.
These are great activities for kids, as the green caterpillars are excellent at hide and seek. Often I will look in the morning, find several, and find more in an afternoon search. It also opens a somewhat conversation about the food chain, and why the caterpillars need to be removed (or eaten by other predators) in order to successfully grow vegetables. If you are having a difficult time justifying killing them, one option is to pick the caterpillars off, and create a habitat that allows the caterpillars to cocoon. However, you will still have to feed them some of your treasured plant, and you may want to take them somewhere further away to let them out or they may once again lay eggs on your veggies!
Note: Some of this information was found in Rodale’s Vegetable Garden Problem Solver by Fern Marshall Bradley, 2007.
A New Home
The day has come to move our seedlings into their new home! Today some of our VolunTEENs got their hands dirty while moving all the little plants into the soil. Many people have asked me, “Isn’t it too late to be putting in a garden?” I, too, thought perhaps it was. But my more experienced gardening and farming friends assured me that a Fall garden has a lot of (usually) untapped potential. We put in acorn, blue hubbard and patty pan squash, watermelon, sorrel, zucchini, chard, cabbage, many different annual and perennial herbs, and native flowers. Next week we plan on seeding scallions, lettuce, spinach (mmmm), mizuna, arugula, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale. There is also a possibility of turnips, parsnips, carrots, kohlrabi, beets and collards. Come by and smell the lemon basil, it’s wonderful.
Here’s to learning more about seasonal growing and eating!
Kyle, Michelle, Kimberly and Kevin planting.
This little chard has already begun to grow!
The Garden, in progress.
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