Hi All,
The past 2 weeks have been BUSY! My bestie went in for knee surgery last Tuesday and I thought I would have time to write a Happy Friday Note for the week before during the time I was helping her and it turned out I did not!!! Thursday we were at the hospital all day and Friday I could not get my laptop to work at her place so I concentrated on making sure she was set up for everything she will be needing. Recovery is going well. The pain kicked in on Saturday but she is taking care of herself around it
Lots of winter prepping in the garden right now. The past 2 weeks we gleaned out at least 10 beds. L02 bed had some monster tomato plants in it! York and I started it the beginning of last week, EL & NF continued gleaning more of it out and the end of the week more volunteers continued gleaning it! Today, with York’s help, I was able to get the tomatoes plants out of the bed but there are still plants needing to be size reduced! I01 was gleaned out over 2 days with EL starting it and her hubby finishing it up the next day! C02 needs mentioning because SM has been harvesting off it all summer so when it came time to glean that bed out I asked SM to do the honors:) RL & JM helped her finish it up!
Last Tuesday found us without power. We had to turn the water off so Ryan and his crew of volunteers brought all the produce over to the church kitchen to wash and pack the produce for deliveries. CW, Dick Crawford & his son, worked with Brenda to get the power back up before the end of the shift! Great job coming together everyone and thank you Asbury for letting us use your kitchen:)
Ten more beds were planted! A01 & B05 were planted with Ruby cabbage & fava beans, A02 with Chinese cauliflower (one of my favorites), H02 now has Marathon broccoli, radishes & carrots, I01 also has Marathon broccoli along with 2 different radishes and D01 was planted with Primo cabbage & beets! Sandia got down and dirty planting beds C01 and E01; C01 now has Whitaker cauliflower & garlic, ARB3 got some lettuce planted in with the asparagus, M02 is going to be growing beets and E01 has BC1011 sprouting broccoli! We are trying something a little different his year, we are leaving some cucumber plants in some of our beds to see how they fair in colder weather. A04 was planted up with garlic but it was planted around the cucumbers. We did not have much luck with them over the summer so let’s see what happens this fall!
More orders for the school’s plant orders were potted up. There are a few more to get finished but the school’s are picking their winter veggies up and planting into their gardens! The rest of the plants were potted up and stored in the Little Hoop House for future plantings in the garden. Luckily Brenda realized the irrigation timer went in the Little Hoop House and she was able to get that switched out before we lost any plants! Ryan fixed a sprung sprinkler in the smaller Greenhouse and again, no loss! The Greenhouse is holding most of our greens which if they miss a watering can be hard to bring back!
The past 2 weeks we harvested over 1500lbs of produce to send in to our local food pantries! We had such an abundant harvest one day that M, for Livermore Homeless Refuge, came back to pick up the tomatoes because she did not have room in her car for everything to go at the same time!
Thank you everyone for coming out to help and for being patient with me in getting this Happy note out;)
Take care
Lori
