Hello!
Thank you to all who rearranged their schedule to be out in the garden earlier than normal on the extremely hot days! There were so many chores completed thanks to everyone showing up and helping out!
Garden wide last week you all got out there and helped us to hold back the bindweed as best you could! The flowers are looking beautiful (Brenda, RL and I were talking about how it is part of the Morning Glory family) but it is not healthy for our vegetable plants. It starts climbing up the veggies which makes it hard for the plants to produce any fruit! The OGs out in the Orchard were weeding out the bindweed as well!
Squash bug hunting has begun! Once the squash plants are planted and doing their thing the squash bugs come out to feast on them. Volunteers went through our squash beds hunting for the adult bugs as well as the eggs. Once found the adults either get squashed (no pun intended) or tossed into a bucket of water. The eggs just get squashed! It is important to hunt the bugs because we found in one of the beds that the bugs were spreading a disease from squash plant to squash plant. We need to squash that as soon as possible (pun intended, lol)!
Volunteers were also out helping to fix leaks on the irrigation in our beds, adding a trellis for a green bean bed, tucking tomatoes into their cages before they take over the paths and watering whatever needed watering…that included each other, lol!!! Ryan, JM & MS made tomato cages, RB Weed Annihilator was back at it, RL feed & watered the worms and checked & replaced the emitters for the blackberries! Two young NCL members pruned back the celery as well as saved the seeds back from it, the Orchard OGs were out filling gopher holes and Enrique & JM installed the the emitters on the kiwi and milkweed plants out front!
Every shift helped to get our summer veggies planted! Seeds were planted; lima beans, melons, bitter melons and cucumbers…over 250 seeds were direct sown into the beds! Transplants from the greenhouse; melons, okra, peppers and eggplants…over 200 planted into the beds! We were also able to get 4 beds prepped for future planting:)
All that (and I am sure so much more!!!) got done as well as our weekly harvests! All totaled we harvested 355.5lbs last week for our local pantries!
Go Team Go! Thank you all for coming out and helping to make this happen week after week:)
Take care
Lori
