Saturday, May 10, 2008

Garden Progress and Mother's Day Planting

Much progress has been made in our garden. The transformation is quite amazing. Margie has put in a whole lot of time with the tiller. Tilling the soil and retilling with compost. Margie also put the drip system back together - as much as she could. Layne repaired the water spigot and reconnected the water over to the north section of the garden. We went from straw, straw, straw. To clay, clay, clay. To beautifully tilled rows running north to south.
We still need to figure out where the water comes out on the north side, connect it to the drip system and then figure out how much more hose and connectors, etc. are needed to extend the drip system out to the banked area outside the garden fence.
But we will pause this weekend on Sunday, May 12th to do a little bit of planting. Tim has been growing some starters for us:
>3 Rainbow Heirloom Tomatoes >4 Brandywine Tomatoes >3 Cold Set Tomatoes >5 Bush green beans >2 Broccoli >2 Zucchini >2 Strawberries >1 Cayenne pepper
and we have some lettuce seeds which we can plant in the raised beds.
We will gather in the garden after 2nd service (around 12:20 pm or so). Please join us if you can.
And with planting commencing, but watering not yet figured out, we will need some watering volunteers, so think about when you might be able to come over and water to keep our plants growing.

2 comments:

Joan Gregory said...

Oops ... that's Sunday, May 11th ...

Allison Zafiratos said...

Hi all - I am new to blogging so let me know if I am doing something incorrectly...I watered Wednesday and today (Thursday) as it had rained on Monday. It is so windy, and warm enough, that I think I will check on the garden tomorrow (Friday) and plan to water on Sunday if no one else was planning on doing that. What are the plans for future watering? The lawn is going to need some watering pretty soon...and I think I saw a sprinkler around, so that was my plan on Sunday...It would be helpful if whoever was there for the seed plantings could throw some straw down on the seeded areas so you can see just where the water needs to go and maybe write on the posts what was planted where? We need some sort of a watering attachment to the hose if anyone has one to donate, also a lawn rake would be handy to rake the lawn area and beds after mowing. Bob said he had asked Layne to toss some of the grass in the compost bin but not all, any composters have comments on that? I said that sounded fine to me as Bob is a composter so I figured he knows what he's talking about. The lawn area was mowed but as I had feared, as the perennial beds were only partly weeded, they mowed down some of the perennials. On second look I suggest we plant herbs along the walkway perennial beds as there are already some herbs there, and I think the space along the fence would be great to plant pumpkins! Just my idea...I emailed Layne and Bob and let them know some of the perennials had been mowed down (including irises just about to bloom :() and since we want to keep whatever else we discover/plant from the same fate I asked them how best to let the mower know what we would like to NOT have mowed. My thought was that the area inside the black liner would be the easiest way to denote the lawn area, but I think it might take a while to pull all the grass out from the perennial beds. That's all I know for now. See you in the garden! Allison Zafiratos