Hi All,
Hope the weekend was well for all of you! Tod, Kiley and I got to go see some long time friends in Gardnerville, Nevada and the weather was perfect there! It is always so fun to try and help peeps in new areas figure out what would be best to plant in their areas. One of our friends wanted to know what would be best to plant for butterflies so I got to share with him what I learned from Doug Tallamy and found the Native Plant Society for their area while in Gardnerville this weekend. One of their neighbors is part of the society! They are zone 6 so if anyone knows anything about that zone and would like to share please drop me a line and I will pass the info on to him.
Lots of seed starting going on in the garden; over 3,00 seeds were started last week and over 2,500 of them were tomatoes for the Plant Sale! 48 of the tomatoeswere brought in by KB, they are called “Roy’s Cheetah” and will be used for the garden. In fact she brought in quite a few others that we will be trying out this year! The rest of the seeds were greens and herbs. Some for the Plant Sale others for the garden which we will be using as soon as they are big enough. Three beds were prepped and planted over the weekend with seeds we had started just a few weeks ago! Over 600 new plants, Tatsoi, Japanese Giant Mustard and Mesclun. We will be able to harvest some delicious greens within the next month!
Paarth was out with his troop to complete his Eagle Scout project-our second produce washing table/sink! He has been working on this for a few months now and he had as much assembled as he could before bringing it over to the garden to install the table, lay new pipe and connect to the sink! They also laid down cardboard and wood chip for the North side of the table!
LP and KM took the strawberry baskets off of the M01 lettuce & the M04 chard and while checking the radishes in M03 they found a super invasive weed that they meticulously took out of the bed. Unfortunately I did not get a picture for us to use so if we see it again I will be sure to do that so we can educate ourselves!
Our bees will be back before you know it so KS started helping last week with scraping off the frames and foundations of all the old comb that was left on them. There were a few frames that we needed to throw out due to the wax moth damage but we are able to salvage a lot of what we have. I have also been emailing Jennifer Radkte, beekeeper for 18 years, and she has given me a lot of tips on how to get the equipment cleaned.
Enrique M. and the Friday crew continued working on the West side of the front end of the garden with cardboard and wood chip. They got about 75% done-they were also weeding around the office, helping to find the pipe for Paarth’s sink install, taking out some garbage AND helping load compost for one of our garden coordinators for her school garden-and then he finished it up with the Saturday crew!
We started moving Garden of Grace plants over to Livermore High School! Yup, the Hoop Houses are starting to fill up on the garden grounds! We have been trying our best at keeping them organized, at least by plant and eventually alphabetical! We are doing consistent inventories to be sure we are not losing any plants (it happens!).
Clean up and weeding around the garden is a constant. You all have been helping us to keep up on the office, getting the garbage cans dumped and anything else that may need to go out around the garden. Weeding, oh…the bindweed is making its comeback! I have been seeing it around the garden paths lately so keep an eye out for it and help us to stop it in its tracks if you can! RB Weed Annihilator was out and hacking the weeds around the large rain barrels over by the Compost Area! There are some weeds that are starting to seed. If we see more of that be sure to place them into the green bin out front. We do not want weed seeds in our garden compost bins.
We harvested almost 160lbs of produce for our neighbors and KM brought in 3lbs of lettuce to share with our neighbors too! The broccolis & cauliflowers are coming on fast and it looks like the lettuce LP & KM uncovered in bed M01will be ready within the next week or two:)
Thank you everyone for putting in the hard work to make this all continue happening
Take care
Lori
