Hi All,
Last week Del Valle Culinary Arts students came out to help in the garden and discover where the food that their teacher gets from us comes from! They helped with harvesting cherry tomatoes, kale, chard and broccoli????? They also helped to wash and pack the produce for us to send out to the pantries! While harvesting the kale 3 of the boys learned how to dispose of a grasshopper so it does not eat all our produce! Two other students learned that bees do not WANT to sting you because once they do they die! At the end of the shift we shared with them some green pumpkins that fell off the vine that can actually be used like zucchini…Brenda and I learned that last week while trying to figure out what to do with the pumpkins! See, always be open to learning cause you never know when or where it will come from!
York was out too! They brought us our clean gloves and helped around the garden. We, AN & I, got to gleaning broccoli out of bed M02 and everyone else got to chopping it up into smaller pieces for the compost bin. They also helped me fill up some gallon jugs for the pitcher plants I still have at home. The future plan is to plant the pitcher plants in the big grey tub we have over by the wash station. We also checked in on the worms to be sure they still had enough moisture and KA fed them a handful of the greens he helped chop up!
One day last week I wrote on the chores list that H02 needed to be looked at because it was looking VERY dry. LA asked me 2 or 3 times about the bed and each time I kept saying I needed to talk with Brenda about it. On LA’s last ask Brenda just happened to be there and we found that the irrigation battery had died! Thank you LA for keeping up on finding out why H02 was so darn dry! LA watered the beds while Brenda showed me how to reset the irrigation schedule!
H01 was gleaned out last week…that means our new season has begun! We just got the Valley Transplant plants today so this week we can get that bed prepped and some winter veggies planted! We also got a list going today for other beds to glean out and start prepping them too!
The new expansion got some much needed watering during the week and Brenda and AW fixed the irrigation to run every other day to keep the new trees watered in! They also fixed a broken pipe in H01 before that bed dried out on us!
And of course weeding happened! JR got some weeds out in the N beds and some of the ladies worked on the weeds leftover in bed M02. New volunteer, HA, weeded out the North end of bed K05 and left the new celery sprouts inside the irrigation hoses.
The Annual Taste for Giving Fundraiser Gala was a hit with everyone who attended! We had tomato tasting, bed sponsorship, live auction, a raffle and we got to sell our honey this year! The company was amazing and the food was delicious! Brenda’s mom made the napkins for our tables and everyone loved the veggie theme she went with
…and bees;) Jeff Kaskey was our MC and did an absolutely wonderful job at it! There are a lot of behind the scenes people who went out and gathered the raffle/door prizes/live auction goods, organized and put the event together! Volunteers came out and helped us harvest the day of for the tomato tasting and centerpieces! The night of the gala NCL & AYLUS came out to help us at the gala with the set up, the tasting and running the prizes! Thank you all!!!
So much happened last week but let us not forget who we do this for;
493.07lbs of produce went into our food pantries last week
Thank you everyone for continuously showing up whenever you are available to keep Fertile GroundWorks doing what it does best, serve the Livermore Community!
Take care
Lori
