Happy Monday everyone!
I hope everyone had a chance to celebrate their families and Moms of every type who touch us throughout our lives. Out in the garden, we carried on celebrating and working with Mother Earth, life giver to us all. This blustery afternoon is perfect for sitting inside and marveling at all we have gotten done in the garden these past couple weeks. With the help of members of Breaking Beariers, Promoting Leadership Among Youth, YORK, Rise & Shine, the Girl and Boy Scouts, Boy’s Team Charity, UC Davis Leadership program, and teams from Rimini Street, Car Max, Workday and Sandia, plus all our regulars the garden is being transitioned from winter crops to summer crops. THANK YOU ALL!
Together we have been able to harvest and share a whooping 1,363 pounds of fresh produce to share with our neighbors. Yes, those onions you harvested add up quickly.
On top of all that harvesting you all also removed barrows full of bind weed from 15 garden beds. To those 3,471 sq feet of bed space you added just over 22 cubic yards of compost, aka 30,000 pounds of it, along with a touch of fertilizer to nourish all the seedlings that are and will be planted into them. Thanks to you all, twelve of the beds you prepared are now home to 32 eggplant, 45 jalapeno, 61 cucumber, 76 okra, 84 tomatillo, 201 tomato, 226 companion herb seedlings, and138 potato chits. Only 100 more tomatoes to cage, and 465 to plant and then cage. Sore yet? Tuesday’s crew will love planting the three already prepped beds with melons, summer squash and more eggplants.
Out in the orchard, the trees that survived the varmints are starting to produce fruit, YAY! So much fruit that we had to do thin the baby fruit down to 1 fruit for every 2-4” of branch. Some branches had 8 or more fruit in as many inches, which means none of those fruit would have had a chance to grow more than an inch around and most likely the tiny little branch holding them all would have snapped. Oh so sad that would have been. Thanks for the thinning lesson, NM. The fence gate is almost done and the orchard fence seems to be working as there have been no signs of varmint attacks so far this spring. Knock wood and fingers crossed. All around the orchard RE, DC and JS have been busy with all sorts of mowing tools from weed whackers to
Betsy, the tractor, to mow the pasture areas. It looks great and the raptors are loving the ground squirrels.
In addition to all that garden bed work, you also got ditches dug that let us complete installing irrigation into the new hoophouse, and let us begin connecting the rain catchment system to the garden’s main irrigation system. Scouts from Troop 905 helped their fellow Scout implement his Eagle project to build 24 feet of new wooden benches for our original hoop house. We are already using them to hold the pepper and eggplant seedlings that we had housed in the high school greenhouse. It is a joy to not have to bend over to pick up the flats anymore – ah the bane of being tall – two feet high is just not high enough. Thanks AM and fellow Scouts and family!
As always, my sincere and heartfelt gratitude to all of you for everything you do to help the garden be loved and productive and making the world a better place for all of us to live in.
Until next we meet, please do stay safe and keep loving the ones you are with.
All my best
Brenda
PS please do share your favorite recipes for our new cookbook at https://www.fertilegroundworks.org/recipes/
