Garden grows

We’re not able to keep the blog updated right now, but rest assured that the LMS community garden is alive and well.  Come by and see what’s happening!

Another delicious spring

The LMS Community garden is coming to life for its second growing season, and we have some exciting events coming up for March:

Our spring work party will be March 14th from 1 to 3.  Projects include: finishing bed preparation, putting soil amendments and compost on beds, putting up more chicken wire to keep out those hungry bunnies, and (weather permitting) staining the gate.

Polly Schmitt ties down chicken wire at last fall's work party

There will also be a solar panel and water pump installation/ demonstration on March 14th.  From 10AM until 3PM.  This is a free demonstration of how to install a small solar panel and water pump.  Local Solar & Wind expert, Kelly Keilwitz, will lead the installation process (see his website at: www.whidbeysunwind.com).

Students from the Langley Middle School Adventure Ed. class will be doing preliminary garden bed work and preparing the pathways for cardboard and gunny sacks this spring.  They will also be pulling out all the old tomato plants from the greenhouse, getting it ready for a new crop.

Growing strong in 2009

Kimmer with December's tomatos

While this blog has remained in 2008, our little garden project has continued forward.  Let’s catch up on the last few months:

October:

During our work party in October, 11 volunteers came out to build raised beds, line the pathways with cardboard and gunny sacks, put up chicken wire to help keep the bunnies out, and create hanging racks in the shed for all our donated smocks.  We use gunny sacks to keep the weeds down both because they are extremely effective and because they are a reusable byproduct from the Northwest’s booming coffee industry.  Many of the larger coffee retailers leave tremendous piles of these burlap sacks outside their warehouses for gardeners like us to take, and we’re happy to help.

Evan Callahan hangs up the new smock hooks in the shed

October gave us a harvest of over 65 pounds of squash, carrots, beets, turnips, beans, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and bell peppers. We also had several flats of donated Fall starts to plant – cabbage, celery, Swiss chard and kale.

November/December:

Students continued to harvest the remaining beans, lettuce, tomatoes and bell peppers through December.  The tomatoes were still going strong in December until a long cold spell (with about 15 inches of snow, an amazing amount for Whidbey Island) blasted us.  So the students harvested all the tomatoes before the cold killed them: red, orange, yellow and green.  The yellow and orange ones ripened in Kimmer’s home, then were brought to the food bank for the holidays.

Kim Drury and Damien Cortez, manager at Good Cheer Food Bank, hang chicken wire to protect our precious crops

We cooked the green ones into pies mixed with apples.  Unfortunately, the snow caused havoc with school schedules and the students didn’t get a chance to eat the pie.

January/February:

The garden project received a grant from South Whidbey Schools Foundation for $1,000 to purchase and install a solar panel and water pump.  The solar panel will generate enough electricity to power a small  pump so that the garden’s rain barrels will have water pressure (yeah!).  This means we will be able to use hoses, sprinklers, and a variety of watering devices instead of just using watering cans, a long and tedious task.  And we add yet another sustainable solution to our beautiful community garden!  Check back for updates on the installation.

Laurie Keith and Commissioner Helen Price Johnson hang chicken wire to deter rampaging rabbits

Look for updates on spring events soon – we can always use your help!

A new year

Emma helped us during a big harvest in August - here she is inside the hoophouse with our first ripe tomatos. We also harvested carrots, beets, peas, cabbage, broccoli, turnips and onions that week.

Through a mixture of good luck, dedicated staff and community volunteers, our garden at LMS made it through the summer in great shape!  We’ve officially been operating for a year now, and have donated over 250 pounds of produce to Good Cheer, the local food bank.  We’re continuing to grow and look to produce even more this school year.  New classes, new kids, new crops – here’s a look at some of the highlights from the summer:

Aqua Chautauqua, the traveling circus/ community group based out of Port Townsend, came to Langley at the end of July for a performance.  As part of their visit, they organized classes, lectures, and exchanges for the community before the official show in the auditorium.  Bob Effertz from Langley organized an attempt to gain the world record for number of didgeridoos played simultaneously (somewhere over 200).  The weather didn’t cooperate, though, and only about 50 people showed up, so he went for the never-before-attempted record of most people playing digeridoo while hula-hooping.  I think we hit 44, which smashed the previous record of 0.

I love didgeridoos and luau parties as much as anyone, you’re thinking, but what does this have to do with the community garden?  Well, we joined in the festivities by hosting a worm bin workshop.  About a dozen people showed up to learn about the benefits of vermiculture and how to build a bin out of wood.  Our red wrigglers have been at work these past two months digesting our food scraps and producing amazing compost for the garden.  We hope to fill all three bins soon with scraps from the middle school cafeteria.

Tools required: an electric drill and saw, screws

See the plan we used on  Seattle Tilth’s website here (in PDF form)

Anza prepping the corner supports

Savannah’s crew preparing the lid for one of our three boxes

Marcia is readying the sides for the worm bin

We received a grant from the city of Langley’s new Neighbor-to-Neighbor fund that paid for the materials for these new additions to the garden – come by and take a look at how our worms are doing!

Radishes in the Sky – An exposé

We tried a new way of growing radishes here at the community garden, one that you may not yet be familiar with. Most of our radishes got harvested in the normal way, but we saved about 5 or 6 plants to go to flower. Here’s the bed in bloom in early July:

Along all of those stems, the flowers are giving way to juicy radish pods. About half the size of a pea-pod, they have a really nice, juicy, mildly radishy taste. Some varieties of radish have been bred to be grown like this – one well-known one is called “Rat Tail”, which may explain why these pods have been slow to catch on – but any radish will do. Close-up of the pods:

They’re great fresh from the garden, in salads, or in a stir fry, and a great way to get a second crop out of your radish bed without any extra planting or work. Genius!

Lettuce – give thanks

We’ve gotten months of tasty greens from our lettuce patch, more than we could have hoped for. The time has come, though, when their biology has caught up with them, and they are reaching for the sky:

Bolting happens – we’re cool with it. About half of the lettuce has bolted or is about to, so we pulled most of it and added it to the donations for the food bank. Along with a huge bag of swiss chard, loads of broccoli leaves, baby Bull’s Blood Beet greens, carrots, and peas, we brought 28 pounds of produce to Good Cheer this week. More pics of the harvest:

Some tasty young chard ripe for the taking

This guy isn’t ready yet, but he’s well on the way in these zucchini days of summer

Artsy sage-and-carrots shot – we thinned the carrots for the last time this week and now they’re growing away to their full size

Our total donation

And now a look inside the greenhouse. The tomatos are growing bushily – I strung them up two weeks ago to give them some more space:

All of those cords are attached to the ceiling – this is a less extreme form of the stringing technique that Hanna at This Garden is Illegal demonstrated here in her blog. There may very well be some fruits lurking in that mass of foliage already, but these cherry tomatos at the far end of the greenhouse are what i’ve found so far:

---

One more thing, this about saving seed.  We want to teach all aspects of gardening to the kids and community members we work with, and a big part of that process is saving your seed from year to year.  If a particular crop grows especially well in your garden, it only makes sense to keep the seeds and plant it again and again.  There are bigger issues playing into this as well, probably beyond the scope of this blog, but preserving the genetic diversity of seed crops and the freedom of exchange are crucial concepts being threatened by large companies and their policies (watch the documentary The World According to Monsanto for a wake-up call to the importance of these issues – I highly recommend it).  By saving our seeds, we keep everything local and increase our connection with what we grow.

For us, the mizuna was a fantastic crop this year, and also the first to go through a complete cycle – it all bolted by mid-May.  We left two of the best-looking plants to flower and produce seeds.  To keep them from being mistakenly pulled out and to contain them, we tied them to a large stake as we wait for the seed pods to dry:

Another benefit: the yellow flowers have attracted lots of bees to our garden.  Once these seed pods have dried, we’ll collect them, pop out the seeds, and store them for next year.