Week 10 Part 1: Harvesting (Wednesday 11/20)

As we near the end of the semester, we're on the path to finalizing our garden. Today, our main plans are to create content for our video tour, monitor our plants, and continue harvesting! Our plants have been doing well, with dense foliage on the leafy greens and carrots, ears of corn on the maize plants, cucumbers on the trellis, around 5 growing pumpkins, and a good amount of green tomatoes, peppers, and beans. The radishes are starting to grow larger, and we've got a rogue watermelon maturing too. 


Snapshots from the garden! In the picture on the left, there's broccoli at the back, Chinese cabbage in the middle, and carrots at the front. In the picture on the right, there's a growing cucumber. When looking closely at the cucumber, spines on the surface can be observed. These are a type of trichome, which are growths from the epidermis (outer layer) of a plant. Trichomes are involved in plant defense and development (Wang et al., 2021). 

We were able to get a good harvest today! The carrots were abundant, and we were able to take home corn, cucumbers, and some green tomatoes, peppers, and beans as well. Plans for our vegetables include pickling and cooking. Additionally, postharvest processing involved separating the carrot greens from the carrots, removing the spines from the cucumbers, and giving everything a good wash. Here are pictures of what we harvested:


Although it was a great harvest day, there are issues we need to address with the plot, which we'll be doing this Friday (11/22). Our plot has a large amount of weeds, so we'll need to weed before Thanksgiving break to ensure that our plot isn't overrun with weeds. Weeds compete with the crops we're growing for resources, such as water, sunlight, and nutrients. By applying fast-acting fertilizer, we're helping our crops grow, but weeds can take advantage of the benefits too. We'll also need to thin some of the pumpkin foliage and look into why our tomatoes haven't been ripening well. 


Tomato plant ft. weeds

Source: Wang, X., Shen C., Meng, P., Tan, G., & Lv, L. (2021). Analysis and review of trichomes in plants. BMC Plant Biology, 21, 70. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-021-02840-x. 

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