What a busy, beautiful Spring!
It's been a while since I've updated you on the happenings in the garden, so here goes.
Saturday- Ruth, Brett, Becky and I spent a good amount of the morning at the garden. Designing layout for beds, planting, transplanting and organizing bins (thanks for labeling Ruth!) and visiting with curious kids and adults passing by to taste fresh-picked carrots and radishes.
As we continue to learn what works and what doesn't in this communal gardening experiment we've decided to lay out beds to get the best yield of vegetables and avoid shading or crowding of plants. We are also staggering the plantings, adding a bit more each week as previous plants start to grow. This is more in line with the Squarefoot Gardening method and will allow us to hopefully get consistent yields from a variety of plants.
It is a bit of an organic process, with discussion and decision making happening on Saturdays from 9-10am, often going on till noon. If you are interested in participating, I encourage you try and make it over at that time. This week we planted tomatoes, peppers, green and pole beans. Next week it's Cilantro, Eggplant, Basil and more Peppers and Tomatoes!
As always, we welcome anyone from the community wanting to get involved in the planting, watering and educational programs to contact us through this website.
Seedlings... Brett and I have been experimenting with starting plants from seed as opposed to buying starter plants. It's way cheaper and fun! Brett has had great success with some tomato seedlings that we planted yesterday. I have had less success with cucumbers, all was going well until I transplanted in compost instead of regular soil and zapped them, the beans seemed to have withstood my heartlessness and will hopefully start climbing up our trellis' soon.
This is how you start from seeds. Just place a papertowel in bottom of dish, keep moist and near a window
Beautiful cucumber babies silently screaming that the compost soil was too hot! Sorry, I'm a new mom
Now this guy knows what he's doing
FINALLY- a huge shout out and thanks to the crew that helped paint the new cedar shelving and give a fresh coat to our existing fencing and beds. THANK YOU Clara, Ellie, Grace, Karen, Grant, Hayden, Riley, Ray, Calvin, Colin and Becky! You made it a fun, short and relatively painless process.
That's it for now.
Stay tuned for details on our next movie screening "NO IMPACT MAN"
Friday, April 27th and KEEP GROWING!