Essentials when Growing Cabbages

Essentials when Growing Cabbages

The past few months have been a tireless education in growing Cabbages.  Nairobi enjoys a mixed sunny and rainy season between the months of October to January.  We planted a cabbage patch, a head count of around 1,000 cabbages.  Cabbages are a great vegetable to have at the table, easy to cook, nutritious and can be eaten raw and in salads.

We’re currently on the fourth month with the cabbages.  They have curled into cabbage heads and require a lot of weeding.  Here are a few essentials we’ve found in the past few months that will help you while growing cabbages.

Essentials:

1. Preparation:  When you’re planting your cabbages, plan out your garden in advance.  Space your cabbages appropriately, leave sufficient space for you to navigate through the cabbage patch.
2. Plenty of Water: Cabbages love water.  Make sure it’s accessible and water them daily or on a schedule.  It’s great when you have an irrigation system; this helps you manage the watering.  But if you don’t, plan time to water your young cabbages.
3. Pests: Cut worms, aphids, birds they love newly planted cabbages.  Monitor your crops on a daily basis, aphids under the leaves, cut worms in the soil.  Be diligent because the cut worms cut the stems on the young cabbages in the soil.  You find a withered plant.
4. Minerals & Nutrients: Keep the soil healthy for your cabbages.  Improve phosphorus and nitrogen levels.  Organically, increasing healthy micro organisms in the soil, using compost manure, worm castings or chemically using fertilizers like CAN and DAP.
5. Weeding: Keep your cabbage patch neat.  You’re more likely to spot the pests both animal, insects and humans if your cabbage patch is clean and you can see each cabbage head.

Remove the sickly leaves on the cabbages to prevent the spread of leaf diseases. To encourage healthy leaves to grow. We do this on a daily basis, just do a walk through of the cabbage patch and check the cabbages, especially the leaves closest to the ground.


Most of all, have fun taking care of your cabbage patch.  Look forward to a healthy harvest.

How to create a Short Hedge in your Flower Garden

How to create a Short Hedge in your Flower Garden

We’ve been growing a hedge for the past ten months or so using non-perennial ornamental bushes. We’re hoping to make it a small hedge that surrounds our flower garden.  The purpose of this hedge will be to discourage people from stepping on the flowers growing in the garden.  This morning, we spent a few moments trimming the plants so that they would grow in a straight line.  We also put in posts and wire that will help guide the bushes to grow to the height we are targeting.

Posts - Reused wood

Trimming Scissors

Things we needed:

6 posts- can be used wooden sticks.

Wire

Trimming Scissors

Procedure:

1. Make sure your garden is free of weeds first.  This way it will be easier to work with the plants.
2. Measure the size you want your fence to grow into.  Our height goal is 3”, so we measured the posts to be 5” tall.
3. Dig holes according to the length of your garden and how far your fence is.  For us we needed 6 posts, for 6 holes along the fence.  The distance between each post is at your discretion.  The depth of the holes was 2” inches.
4. Put your posts in to the holes, and make sure they are firm. 
5. Tie the wire along the posts at the height you want your fence to reach.
6. Weave the branches into the wires.  This will direct your plant to grow along the wire, and any branches straying away above the wire, get to be trimmed.

This picture on the left is the end result.  This activity makes it easier to trim the branches of the plants as they grow into the wires creating the small hedge below.

Short Hedge

Beauty uses for Strawberries in Nairobi

Here at Jade Gardens Farm, we love strawberries.

Strawberries - yum!

They are mostly eaten in salads, with whipped cream or in smoothies or juices. They can also be used for beauty reasons like on your skin.

Strawberries are good for your skin while applied topically. They are packed with anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants help skin look younger & brighter, they repair skin that has been burnt by the sun. They also effectively and efficiently deal with oily skin and acne.

Strawberries also have AHA's (Alpha Hydroxy Acids); they have excellent exfoliating capabilities. This means they remove the skin's dead cell build-up which leaves your skin glowing.

Here are tow Strawberry scrub ideas you can use at home:

FOR PUFFY EYES:

- 1 large Strawberry

Directions
- Slice the strawberry in half and place the slices on your eyes.
- Remove the slices and follow up with a gentle moisturizer.

FOR SOFT SKIN:

- 1T Organic Honey
- 3 ripe, mushed medium Strawberries
- 1T Heavy Cream

Directions:


- Mix it all to make a paste and apply it on your face.
- Leave it on for 10 minutes. Rinse off with cold water.
- If you have sensitive skin, substitute the cream with yoghurt.

Try this out at home and promise you'll feel great afterwards and your skin will thank you ^_^!

Any other beauty scrubs you use ate home with Strawberries? Please share with us.

Jade Vermi Composting Project

Facts about Composting and Organic farming

1. Composting is a key ingredient in Organic farming.
1. We use organic matter like vegetable and fruit peels, plant leaves and stalks, and food waste to create compost. The decayed matter that comes from gives us fertilizer to use in our soil to enrich it with nutrients.

Using chemicals in soil destroys the good micro organisms that help our plants to grow healthily so we opt to use Composting. We're always excited to learn new ways of improving our soil. This blog introduces to you our new skill, learned from a very cool, awesome guy who does Vermi Composting.

We have recently learned about Vermi Composting. 

What is Vermi Compost?

-        This is using earthworms to create nutrient rich organic fertilizers and soil conditioner.

Why use Vermi Compost?

-        It helps improve soil structure.

-        Improves water holding capacity.

-        Enriches soil in micro-organisms

-        Attract deep burrowing earthworms already present in soil

-        It enhances germination, plant grown and crop yield

-        Improving root germination

The soil turns a dark black color that absorbs water readily

Jade Vermi Composting Project

Here at Jade Gardens, we have started our own Vermi Compost project. We want to try out Vermi Composting. We are always learning new techniques to improve our organic farming. We'll share this new experience with you as we learn a new way of improving our soil using Vermi Compost! For the next 60 days, we’re going to log in our progress on our blog. Stay tuned as we embark on our own vermi composting adventure. 

Did you know?

A worm has no arms, legs or eyes.

What we need: 

1. A box to keep our earthworms warm and working through the night. 

2. Some earthworms. We'll go on an earthworm hunt around our farm.

3. A warm dark area to keep our worms.

Next Week:

We'll show you pictures of our set up!

Stay tuned. 

Jade Gardens Farm

We’re glad to introduce Jade Gardens Farm. We are a family based farm on Ndwaru Road in Riruta, Nairobi. We grow and sell seasonal vegetables, herbs and fruits like Dhania (coriander), tomatoes, rosemary, lemongrass, strawberries, mangoes and avocados to name a few.

We also like to share information on healthy habits to adopt in order to live a healthier lifestyle especially here in our lovely city, Nairobi.

We provide information via e-books which we sell to our customers for a very low price. We have started a series of e-books called “Healthy Habits” that will provide you with a wealth of information on different kinds of herbs, vegetables and fruits that will benefit your health positively.

The first is a series of e-books on Healthy Habits: 15 Essential Herbs for your kitchen. We are working with an online based enterprise named Zealot Merchants to publish and promote our e-books. You can also purchase a copy from our website as well. Just got to our Products Menu and order from the shopping cart, you can also make an order from our contact page and we’ll get back to you immediately.

We are glad to be sharing this information and products with you, and we will continue to do so with your support.

Subscribe to our blog to stay updated on our products, e-books,  healthy tips and ongoing projects at Jade Gardens Farm.

Make sure you check out our Website : www.jadegardens.kbo.co.ke

Check out our facebookpage and Like us

Follow us on Twitter @JadeGardens1

Strawberry goodness

Fun Facts about Strawberries

The fruits are eaten fresh. These variety is small and sweet. Deliciously tasty.

They can be processed into jams and juices, milk shake, yoghurt, cake decorations and in salads. They are easy to plant, can be potted, grown in the flower garden. 

  

We sell Strawberry plant-lets. Check out our website to order a set of 10 pieces to grow in your garden.