Hi All,
I hope everyone had a great weekend. Tod and I had some of his long time friends over yesterday (he has known them since elementary school!) for dinner and long conversations, it was really nice seeing them:) It is fascinating to me that he still knows his friends from that long ago! I do not have that in my life so it is fun listening to them talk about their 1st, 2nd, 3rd…grade teachers!
Brenda reminded me this morning that she saw a Yellow-faced bumble bee in the garden on Saturday! It looks like it may currently be residing in bed K07, the very North western side, 2nd hose in. I placed an arrow made from the bark we have…check it out if you are in the garden! We do not want to disturb the soil but it is fun to see where the hole is that is possibly leading to her nest. We will need to keep an eye on it the next few days!
Last week we had fun in the garden, am I right!?! York started us off by finishing the gleaning that began in bed L01 the week before and gleaned out 2 cages in bed N08. They found a leak in L01 while gleaning so I got that fixed and they continued their care of the rotating composter by placing a 50/50 mix of fruit and branches in the second half along with a couple of shovels full of our GOG compost.
Gleaning continued through the week with N08 getting finished up first by most of our Tuesday Regulars, bed A14 was gleaned out by one of our long time volunteers, DM, and N09 was 1/2 gleaned during the week and got finished up this past Saturday along with bed AB33 & AB32. A total of 6 beds were gleaned out last week!
The Safeway crew helped us to get some of those beds prepped and planted! Bed L01 was prepped the day before so 3 of their crew and I planted 51 Clementine cauliflower and 220 Red Burger onions. The other 4 crew members got to helping Brenda with prepping one of our longest bed, K07, and helped to fix irrigation leaks in the same bed. After they helped us with those chores they helped our regular Wednesday crew of volunteers to plant bed A14 with 35 Clementine cauliflower and 170 Shandong garlic. Of course, before all that happened they helped to harvest 151lbs of produce to send in to the pantries for that day!
A total of 5 beds were prepped and planted last week with over 2000 Valley Transplant plants; assorted cauliflower, broccoli and onions! 503 GOG garlics were planted and approximately 50 Red Dutch shallots! Over 2500 plants were placed into the ground next week for food in the coming months to share with our neighbors:)
A couple of the guys, RB & CT, helped Brenda organize the tomato cages, more leaks were fixed in beds AB28, AB25, M03 and I am sure more than I am aware of! Still lots of weeding going on. The N09-N11 beds seem to be the worse for having the bind weed. We will need to really dig into those beds and dispose of as much root as possible when we get to prepping those beds.
Harvest was 510.5lbs last week! That is a pretty good job for us now having to rely on the greens. There were some tomato beds gleaned out and will need to be boxed up this week and sent out but that will be coming to an end soon. What we have planted so far is coming on as well as it can and we already started harvesting from a couple of the winter beds.
Lori
