Hi All,
Lots happening in the garden and out of the garden…it was a busy week!
Remember the Valley Transplant Seedlings we received 2 Mondays ago? Brooke, one of our Board Members, picked up some seedlings for East Ave Middle and Jackson Ave Elementary schools to pot them into 4” pots for us! Workday was out and helped to plant up more of the seedlings into 4” pots and some of our regular volunteers helped to get even more potted up! Out of the approximately 17 flats of plants we received last week from Valley Transplant there are 3 full flats and 2 1/2 flats of plants left to not only pot up but to plant into the beds as well.
Yup, not all the plants were potted up…there are quite a few that made it into the ground in the garden! Another 742 transplants from VT made it into our garden beds last week. Chinese cauliflower, Yellow shallots and Jade wok Choy made it into beds I02, B03, B04 (we used GOG compost on this bed), M17, A03 & A05. Some Chesnook Red garlics were planted with the Jade and Shandong garlic made it into the bed with the Chinese cauliflower! Workday also helped to plant the Pawpaws in the expansion and JP planted a Violetta fig into the Orchard that Master Gardener Judy gave to the garden!
Six more beds were prepped up last week for planting, some of which were mentioned in the last paragraph. Omron helped us to finish bed A01 with weeding out the Bermuda grass-that was an arduous job-and had time to finish prepping it for planting this week! Keep an eye on bed A01, we had celeriac in that bed last year and we let it go to seed. We are going to see if it will come up this winter! Another member of the Omron team helped one of our new volunteers, HA, to glean out cherry tomatoes out of bed ARB3. This week we will prep it and get that bed planted as well!
York and Kaleidoscope were out last week! York brought in the cleaned gloves, help to shred up more paper for the worms and regular compost. We checked in on our pumpkins, the ones they helped to cage up last week, and the pumpkins are doing great! Looks like we will have pumpkins to offer to the pantries this year! Kaleidoscope also helped shred up more paper (we have so much of it), pruned back bed M04 of the ground cherries to give sunlight to the sweet potatoes planted there and helped me switch out irrigation hoses in bed A01. Omron and I found out the day before that the hoses were too short to reach the end of the bed and it was completely dried out. Now they fit perfectly to the bed!
With all the gleaning going on last week Ryan and AYLUS worked on the compost area to be sure that continues working! They sifted some older compost from the windrow & the Southeast bin and cleared out the Southwest bin. They staged the tomato mook buckets for using this week to make more compost. Good thing because they have a lot of size reduced branches from the gleaned beds as well as the book buckets of tomatoes that can be used for our GOG compost!
The call was put out for tomato boxes and it was received. AL brought out some USPS boxes that we can utilize and some other kind soul left a stack of tomato boxes for us to find on Friday afternoon! Go community:) EL also brought in some 2 liter bottles for us to use for wax moth traps to try and help our surviving bees! Yes, you saw right, surviving. Our Industrious hive left, there was a lot of trees being knocked down where they are located, and they were scared off. Now we are trying to help our little hive survive. Send lots of love their way while we take the time to help them clean out all those nasty wax moths that are trying to take over! We currently have them in a clean hive box and switched out the base and cover with clean ones. We took the brood frames and placed them into the new box with some of the honey frames from the Industrious hive. We will be out there twice a week to clean out any wax moth activity we see.
Brenda and Enrique on Saturday reorganized the tomato cage area for us all to be able to stack the remaining cages safely. They also went out to the New Expansion to fix the irrigation…again. Not sure what exactly is ripping open the hoses but something is VERY thirsty! We are going to need to place a trough out there to give the critters something to drink from other than our hoses!!!
All that (and more) AND we harvested 1080.07lbs of produce for our neighbors!
Like I wrote earlier in this email, Go Community, GO
Thank you All!!!
Take care
Lori
