Hi All,
March is here! All last week the weather was like spring, March rolled in on Saturday and man it felt like a frigid cold came with it! Does that mean it came in like a lion and will go out like a lamb? I was raised to think it meant the weather and the extremes we see during March. I found an article that says it also was used for the constellations, “Leo rises in the East to start March and ends the month with the constellation Aries (the ram, or lamb) setting in the West.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/02/weather/weather-proverb-march-lion-lamb/index.html
The article also covers how different areas adapted their own interpretation of the saying. It is fun to find out where our everyday sayings originated from.
We ended February with a bang and quickly started our March chores! We were all out in that garden getting things done like we normally do and got a bit of extra help as well from Rutherford Management Company and Sandia National Lab!
Rutherford teamed up with GL and got bed F01 prepped! They broke up the soil, fed it 6 quarts of fertilizer, watered that in and then covered the entire bed with compost-approximately 2300lbs! On Wednesday KS created a make shift “fence” for around the bed to keep feet from walking in it! Remember, they just broke up all that soil to give the roots somewhere to grow into and if we are stepping in to the beds we are compacting all that work! The other half of the Rutherford team helped Brenda and Qaadira pot up over 300 plants, some for the Plant Sale the others for the garden!
Part of Sandia teamed up with Qaadira to get over 2400 sq ft of pathways covered with cardboard and over 18,000lbs of wood chip to the West of the Big Hoop House and along the back side of the N beds. Another third of the team helped me to take out kale beds M15, M16 & B16 for some future plantings. The other third of the team helped Brenda to pot up over 200 plants and planted over 500 seeds also for the Plant Sale and the garden!
York came out as well and helped to start planting lettuce seeds for beds that will be needing to be replanted over the next few weeks. They also helped to open the Hoop Houses, check the temps on the compost bins, fed the right side of the rotating compositor and filled some water bottles for me to continue taking care of the Pitcher Plants at home!
With the help of Rutherford, Sandia, York and the Friday & Saturday crew we potted up over 1,000 plants and seeded almost 4,500 new plants!
Kelly and RM started cleaning out the office last week! They started making room for us to utilize the shelving inside to be able to get most items off the freezer. They were even able to move the shelf into a different position for us to be able to access it better.
K18 was weeded out inside the bed and along the path. The Front End also was weeded out during the week and Friday’s crew laid out the cardboard and wood chip for it. The Orchard was weeded out and the guys continued their pruning of the trees.
The asparagus patches, ARB3 & K18, were mulched with leaves brought in by MB. I did not see anything in ARB3 but RL saw some small plants coming up in K18! The leaves will help the small plants coming up early from any freeze we may have during March!
EL & I fed bin #5 lasagna style during the week and the Saturday crew came in and filled it some more! They also chipped branches and started sifting bin #4. We are going to have a nice pile of compost to pull from by the time spring is here and we are ready to start planting the garden beds!
More tags were made, inventory on the plants were done, organizing the inventory continued. That is everything I see written down in our calc logs for the week!
Harvest was 156lbs for the week and we had 55lbs of lemons come in from Open Heart Kitchen that we also shared with our neighbors!
Great job this week everyone! Thank you for always showing up and helping out!
Take care
Lori
