No Work Day Today (but we'll be back on July 5

Due to a number of scheduling conflicts, we won't have a 200 Foot Garden work day today, but we'll be back on our regular Tuesday schedule next week on July 5.

There are lots of snow peas on the fence, so if you're in the neighborhood, make sure you get some while they're still around.  (We'll need to start taking some of the vines down over the next few weeks, to make room for cucumbers and squash vines.)

(We're still looking for folks interested in watering on a weekend watering team.  If you're interested, please e-mail me.)

Hope to see you next week!

Patrick

good stuff

We had a great work day yesterday.  The weather was perfect and the work went quickly, with Keff, Nathan, Tracy, Noah, and me all hard at work.  We weeded, watered, planted a couple tomatoes and marigolds, and we also thinned out the chard, kale, and mustard greens.  The mustard greens sprouted really well, and we picked a big bag that we split up between us.  I had them in a salad for dinner tonight, and they were delicious.  Incredibly tender and mild, and taste just like the start of summer to me.  Noah picked more than 200 snow pea pods, and I'm sure between altogether we picked well over a pound.  We brought more than half a pound home with us, and with the rain we're getting, there will be plenty more (as long as we keep them picked) on the vines soon.  The pea plants are reaching high above the top of the fence, as tall as my head now.

next work day is Tuesday, June 21

Just a quick post to say that our first "regular" work day will be tomorrow, Tuesday, June 21, at 6:30 pm.  So if you're in Brookline and want to get your hands dirty in the garden, come on down to 99 Kent Street and help us out for a little while.  We'll be doing some weeding, planting of marigolds, watering, and picking some snow peas (which are now about 4 feet tall!).

peppers and peas

On Friday, I got to make good use of our enhanced watering tools--a 100' hose and caddy, which means we'll be able to get water on the garden a lot easier this year.

Nathan put in about ten peppers earlier in the week, and they look great.  We have five sweet peppers and a variety of five hot pepper plants.  (And we might do more.)  The seedlings look good--even the watermelon and squash have sprouted.  The tomatoes look terrific.

(one of the new peppers)

The snow peas are blooming fast now, and the plants have reached the top of the fence.  We're going to have a LOT of snow peas.  I hope they'll keep blooming for a while--I'm at a playwrights conference in Idaho for two weeks, so I fear they'll be gone by the time I get back.  Tracy will handle coordination of watering and volunteers while I'm gone (we need lots of help).  I imagine the garden will look quite different in two weeks.

(snow peas to the top of the fence)

Good news (we have water)

Our planting day on Saturday went well, though planning a work day on Memorial Day weekend might not be the wisest move, if we want lots of hands.  Noah and Keff helped haul seedlings and water, while Tracy and I planted 46 tomato and tomatillo plants, followed by lots and lots of seeds.

The bad news was that we couldn't get any water from the outdoor spigot, so we had to fill watering cans from the bathroom in the main building.  This meant that we couldn't water the seeds, just the seedlings, and just enough to keep them alive in the hot dry weather.

We watered the tomatoes every day this weekend, from the bathroom sink, and felt we could skip watering yesterday, since it wasn't quite so hot.

Today was hot and sunny again.  We thought we'd get a storm around 6pm, but it blew by with lots of thunder and lightning, but no water.  So Tracy and I went over to water, and discovered that the spigot had been fixed.  Having water was excellent news--we brought out a hose caddy that we found in the greenhouse and a new 100' hose that I bought on Monday.  With various other hoses connected, we were able to get water all the way to the first 30 feet of the garden.  We'll still need the watering cans, but the whole task will go much faster now (we don't need to use the wagon anymore).

(Of course since we watered, a second storm has blown through, with rain this time.)

Equally exciting was the fact that, despite the lack of water, the cucumbers, mustard greens, and dinosaur kale had already started to sprout (just 4 days after planting--the soil was quite warm this past week). And the snow peas are now blooming.  Now that we can water a lot easier, I think we can have a better harvest than ever.