Wednesday Work Days start tomorrow

We've decided to have a regular work day every week, so we can get some weeding, harvesting, watering, and other chores done.  We have some watering teams in place for other days, but the Wednesday work days will have a bigger variety of work and make sure we're always at the garden at a regular time.  I think that'll make it easier for new people to find us (we'll put up a sign telling people to show up on Wednesday at 6:30pm if they want to help out).

So--if you're free tomorrow, I hope you'll come on by the garden and help out.  (I won't be there--Allison will be running the show.)  There's not much weeding to do, but we do need to water, and there are a lot of snow peas that should be picked--so come get yourself some crunch, sweet snow peas.

lovely snow peas

Alexis took this fabulous photo of the snow peas in the garden.  Tracy and I walked by today on our way to scrounge some mulberries, and picked a good handful or two.  Leslie and Tova were there watering and had talked a few  passersby into helping.  Thanks to everyone for pitching in!

new flowers and more peas

Alexis picked up a flat of marigolds for the garden (thanks, Alexis!), so yesterday afternoon, Alexis, Nathan, and I planted about 50 marigolds along the sidewalk.  These will form sort of a colorful border row that alerts pedestrians to watch their step.  And the added color will be lovely.

We also picked a good handful of snow peas.  Very sweet.  We gave some away to a few residents of 99 Kent Street, too.  They really like the rain, and it looks like we might get a thunderstorm tonight, which is great.  By the end of the week, we should have a lot more snow peas.  So if you're walking by, be sure to pick a few.  They're so crisp and tender we ate everything we picked before getting more than a hundred yards from the garden.

First Harvest

Yesterday afternoon, I helped water the garden with Nathan and Alexis, and we got the first fruits of the garden.  We found a few small Northeastern Pole Beans ready to pick.  Very fine beans.  More to come soon.

The first bean plant has climbed to the top of the fence, by the way.  The rest are lagging pretty far behind, but it's good to know we've got one lead bean.

And today, on my way home from a meeting, I sampled two snow pea pods that were perfectly sweet.  (The ones picked were a little bigger than this one.)

Everything is in the ground

We had another great planting day yesterday.  With the help of Noah, Leslie, Tova, Harriet, Kim, Jen, Brian, and Alexis, we brought everything down from the greenhouse and put all the rest of the seedlings in the ground--habernero peppers, serano peppers, bell peppers, blue squash, melons, hansel eggplants, beatrice eggplants, sage, black forest vining zucchini.  And we also planted some seeds--bull's blood beets, fennel, more dinosaur kale, cucumber seeds between the seedlings (the seedlings look like they might be permanently stunted), and maybe a few other things. 

And if that wasn't enough, then we watered and watered and watered.  (Here's Noah with a full wagon load of water.)

It looks good, and gives a nice sense of the kind of green density that we hope to see in about 3-5 weeks, or so.

I've been going to the greenhouse daily (or more) since March.  I'll miss it--the quiet and the possibility of it.  Though it also brought a lot more challenges and frustrations than expected.  We did the best we could this year, and next year, we'll see if we can get the temperature to be better controlled (or else we'll have to come up with a pretty big plan B).

Next we need to figure out a good watering plan/teams, so we can keep all these plants alive and growing (a good soaker rain yesterday afternoon helped a lot--I didn't get over there to water today, but I think it'll be all right).  And there are other chores, like more weeding and re-doing the signs, but for now it's nice to just admire the long neat rows of seedlings.

One More Planting Day--Saturday May 29, 10am - Noon

We still need to get the rest of our seedlings in the ground--we have a whole bunch of peppers, eggplant, squash, and other plants that are ready to go.  So please come join us this Saturday morning, from 10am to Noon, at the garden (99 Kent Street).  If you have a spare trowel, please bring it.

I hope we'll see you there!

great planting day last week

I've been slow to post, just because I've been busy with the other part of my working life (the playwriting part), so I've been lax in saying thanks to everyone who helped out last Thursday when we put a few hundred more plants in the ground.  Thanks very much to Keff, Jeff, and Noah, for helping ferry down more than 20 trays of seedlings from the greenhouse.  We were joined by Laurie, Neal, Kira, Alexis, Allison, Yvonne (who brought us some heirloom tomato seedlings), and Tracy.  With all those available hands, we got the plants in the ground very quickly.  (The planting went faster than carrying them down and sorting them.)

I'm happy to report that the plants seem to have handled the transition very well.  The tomatoes in particular (with the exception of one) seem pretty happy.  The cucumbers still have yellowish leaves and I"m not sure they're going to grow very much.  The greenhouse might just have stressed them too much.

Laurie sent these photos of the afternoon:

Allison and Alexis all smiles after the hard work of digging in the plants.

Neal and Yvonne

and the way it all looked when we finished:

Just give it another six or seven weeks, and the whole fence will be green.