HelloAll!
Last week was a busy week, even with the rain keeping us running for cover on Wednesday!
Monday found us in between clouds! YORK was able to come out to help clean up some storm-tossed sunflowers, feed the worms and we took a frame and placed it into a plastic bin so we can see how long it takes for gravity to help us harvest the honey.
Tuesday was sunny! A Lot done that day. JM gleaned out cauliflower in H01, with the help of new volunteer, BC, and planted Bronze Mignonette, lettuce, and Shanghai Hoi CHoi, greens, as part of our succession planting in the garden right now. As the broccoli and cauliflower stop producing heads we start replacing them with lettuce and other greens! The OG’s in the Orchard continued their winter pruning and JR, from Wednesday, is joining them for the next few weeks! He also helped CW to continue the ditch digging for the pipes leading to the orchard. SM and MB worked on weeding the native beds as well as creating plans for them, KW joined them after we harvested broccoli from I01. We checked on the bees, inventoried the greenhouse and got to enjoy seeing the resident fox almost everywhere we went!!!
Wednesday was pretty wet! Kaleidoscope Community Adult Program helped out at the garden for the first time! It was dry when they first showed up but by the time we made it out to the Big Hoop House it was pouring out! They helped us to harvest the rest of the “Christmas decorations” cabbages, made some 4″ pot flats for us to use for the plant sale, planted seeds for the garden and they got to plant some Sugar Daddy peas to take home for themselves! Roger showed up around noon to help us set up a trail cam at the garden to see if it is the fox or the skunk that comes in at night to have fun digging in the garden!
This week we harvested 116lbs of produce to share with our neighbors!!!
Friday Livermore High School Nature Club joined us and helped Ryan and VW to get some compost done, tags were written for the Saturday plantings and a bit of clean up in the Big Hoop House. Brenda and DA switched out a burned out plug in the Greenhouse and Lance helped to move the overgrown broccoli to the Little Hoop House.
Saturday in the garden we potted up ~134 pepper and eggplant seedlings from our January seedings and started another 2,082 pepper and eggplant. After all that greenhouse work we went on to working on the weeds between the big hoop house and water tanks. Pulling another 600 sq ft of weeds and adding about 3,000 pounds of cardboard and wood chips to the 400 sq ft of space we weeded on Friday. IN compost city, Friday they started filling the SE bin and sifting bin #2, Saturday they finished sifting compost bin #2. Also on Saturday Troop 815 worked on completing the chipper shed adding roof and opting to put up the walls after the next rain storm so hopefully they can get them painted before they get wet. Approximately 3,100lbs of wood chips were laid down and 420lbs of compost sifted/created!!!!
Celebrate!!! We hosted our first saturday class of 2024. Graham Stott, one of the Orchard OG team, shared his knowledge of fruit tree grafting with 30 odd folks. Thank you Graham!
And…NB from the Del Valle Culinary Academy stopped by pick up another pumpkin, some purple and green cauliflower to share with her students and to let us know more about the wonderful experience her students had at the school baking one of our other large fairytale pumpkins into pies and all the love that went into it from everyone at the school! She dropped off one of the pies last week for us to share and we all have to say it was the best!!!
Love this work! Love all of you for showing up and helping us to get it all done!
Take care
Lori
