Growing Smart II

One of the purposes of the organic garden was to present the opportunity for our residents to gain new skills.  Along the way I've gained a new skill or two as well.  Over the holiday weekend my son-in-law taught me how to lay out and install our irrigation system.  I should have done this long ago but I found all the parts and pieces daunting. Though I had printed the entire instruction booklet I would open the box, look at all the parts and close it again.

Now I know what I'm doing and I'm so excited!  I can't wait for the sun to come back out so I can set the rather stiff tubing in the sunshine and warm it up.  This will make watering this spring a real snap.  Plus, I can teach this skill to the women here and they will be more knowledgeable, too.    An added bonus is that once I have the organic garden done I can also do the meditation garden and the juniper hill.  Watering with hoses is such a heavy task and now I find out how unnecessary it is!  All one needs is a bit of relatively inexpensive tubing and a bit of knowledge.  

Between this irrigation system and our rain barrels we'll have the whole watering thing kicked!

Oh!  This has nothing to do with our garden, but I participated in NaNoWriMo 2010 and finished so I thought I'd mention this here.  If you don't know what National Novel Writing Month is, it's simply a challenge one undertakes to write a complete novel in 30 days during November. It must be 50,000 words.  So I did it! I did make one of my main characters a serious organic gardener ;-)

Greens!

The garden work day went well.  We put in a new bed and thinned out one of the others which was over-planted with collards.  We even scraped together enough dirt for yet another bed!

The mild weather has meant that the ladies have been eating lettuce from their garden for weeks as well as at least one early meal of collards.  They just couldn't wait.

I cleaned up the greenhouse shed this past weekend and have herbs merrily growing inside, just in case it freezes, which it doesn't look like right now.  So all's well.


Happy Thanksgiving y'all!

I feel a garden work day coming on!

The garden is in great shape and everything looks really good but I want to scrape together the last of the dirt for the final bed and plant some more collards.  The ladies love 'em.  More importantly, I want to whip our greenhouse into shape for the winter.  It is part shed and part greenhouse.  We'll be using it all year but during the winter we will have our plants growing inside.  We already have pots of oregano, sage, dill, parsley and cilantro that can go in larger pots and move inside.  This year we will use it to grow our own seedlings for our summer garden.  Getting a head start inside really helps discourage insects.

Pictured here is our garlic bed.  I mulched it well with peat for the winter.  By June we should have lots of garlic to harvest!

Switching gears: An invitation

Today I believe we will harvest the last of the prolific basil for the ladies lunch of pesto. They are anxious to eat the collards they have grown but I am encouraging them to wait until first frost so the leaves will be more tender. My garlic has sprouted and hopefully will die back soon.  My ginger has produced a graceful stalk and has a single bud, which I hope will produce the lovely flower known for its fragrance and color.  My potted herbs need bigger pots for the winter. And the broccoli and Brussels sprouts looks healthy under their curtains.

So, switching gears a little here, those of you who are local to Augusta are invited to come to First Friday tomorrow night.  Our friends at Garden City Organics are allowing us to set up a table outside their shop at 1034 Broad St. in downtown Augusta.  In addition to our gardening club, "The Green Team," Hope House also has some talented knitters and crocheters.  We'll have scarves, trivets/potholders, hats and bags galore.  The really lovely felted wool purses are just $20 and everything else is even less.  These would make great gifts - even for yourself!  Come out and support the ladies of Hope House!  All proceeds will go toward resident activities such as the knitting circle, garden and field trips. 

Taking a hill

This week the organic garden took a backseat to a barren hillside on campus.  These photos show the before and after but there's no good way to show the hard work a volunteer group from John Deere put in. This hill is steeper than it looks in the photos.  I, personally, wound up doing a belly-slide down as I attempted to hand a juniper to one volunteer at the top.  Throw in our strange, hard-packed, eroded combination of clay, sand and concrete and it was a good thing these folks had John Deere's products to work with!  Even at that we had to rent a jack-hammer to dig the holes!  I am not exaggerating when I say these folks worked hard. 

Truly it was a little surreal.  This was one hardy group, cheerful, fearless and willing.  Our director of development, Stephanie Suarez, set up the venture and put in a 12-hour day.  And she's a little thing.  The residents helped, too, happily passing up buckets of composted chicken manure as needed.

I lead an interesting life.

It's curtains for you, bugs!

For those of you who may not get the above reference, "it's curtains!" commonly means something along the lines of "you've had it!" It comes from the theatrical world where once the curtains close, the act is finished. So, why do I use it here? Well.

We have an organic garden here at Hope House.  That means no nasty pesticides, which unfortunately has meant a few nasty bugs.  We've picked, sprayed good stuff, all to no avail.  Something (I suspect grasshoppers) swept in one night and chewed their way through my very healthy fall crop and just ticked me off.  Whatever it was got a piece of everything but the broccoli, which is happily growing under a cloth dome.  I used the cloth there because past experience led me to believe we'd be growing green worms along with the broccoli if we didn't.  So, when I saw the damage I decided to go back and cover the Brussels sprouts the same way.  (I just hope I'm not trapping any bugs in at this point!)

The beautiful thing is what I use to cover the beds: curtains!  IKEA makes these Lil curtains that are more like netting.  I think I mentioned them when I covered the broccoli, but as they work so well I thought I'd give a little more detail.  They are $5 (no typo) for two panels and each panel easily covers my 6' X 4' beds or I can cut them in half and cover two 4'X 4' beds.  That's cheap.  They are not weathering at all in the sun and the rain goes right through them without effort, no puddling so no weight pull-down.  The wind also goes right through them.  The thing is, these are weird for curtains, more like lightweight fabric screens in white.  When I first used it on the broccoli bed I stapled it to my raised bed.  Unnecessary!  When I covered the Brussels sprouts yesterday, I simply arranged it over the hoops (available from Gardeners Supply) and the rough wood of the bed gripped the curtain like Velcro!  Easy-peasy! 

These photos show the Brussels sprouts under their new cover. The close up is not a great photo but will give you a better idea of why these curtains work as described. 

Genetic Gardening

One thing I've learned doing this garden is that those women whose mothers or grandmothers liked to garden are the ones most interested in doing this.  Perhaps it calls up some gentle childhood memory or the feel of the sun on one's back is somehow remembered in one's sinews, but whatever it is, it seems to run in generations.

I, too, recall the garden of my childhood.  Though we lived in the heart of the city both my mother and my grandmother had gardens.  Granma was much more serious about hers.  She grew everything: flowers, vegetables, even wheat.  What hard ground she had to till!  We visited every Sunday and never went home empty-handed.  She grew the wheat, she said, because she never wanted us to forget where bread comes from.  She immigrated here from Ukraine, sometimes known as the breadbasket of Europe.

My mother's garden was more modest.  She planted flowers and some tomatoes and salad greens.  We lived in an apartment house and the backyard was just a lot.  She fenced off a portion of it and worked the ground until it yielded to her design.  She could be stubborn. She would have been 100 this year had she not died on this day exactly three years ago.

Today I chopped the okra down.  It had grown so tall it was tipping over and the production was slowing anyway.  Life grows on.