Resource for Utah Vegetable Gardens

Frank sent this link to a very helpful pamphlet from USU's Extension Division: Home Vegetable Garden Variety Recommendations for Utah: http://extension.usu.edu/files/gardpubs/hg313.pdf. This pamphlet has many suggestions for Utah vegetable gardeners regarding what to plant and when. Frank has used this document many times and has found it very useful. Especially valuable, is the chart on the last page showing planting dates and the number of days required for the crop to mature and be ready for harvest.

To Do List

If you do one or more of the following items on this "TO DO LIST" or can commit to doing these, please blog or send email to Joan:

• Watering – while we wait for the drip system to be installed – we need daily watering – preferably morning or evening
• Weeding
• Dandelions from the church lawn
• Dandelions from the garden lawn
• Weeds from the garden
• All sorts of weeds from between the stones on the garden walk
• Grass and weeds from the herb garden – to make a clear differentiation between the perennial/herb strip and the lawn area
• Grass from the sloping beds outside the fence
• Rock removal
• Remove rocks from
• West end of the garden lawn
• Parking strip in front of the garden (just the stray rocks - leave the pavers in place)
  
• Move rocks to
• the north east – in front of the shed and in back of the plastic composter
• Parking strip – figure out how to mow it – perhaps a small push mower would do the trick if we are able to remove the rocks
• Straw - Move a small amount of the straw around the plants that have been planted (to keep the weeds from growing).

Much to Report

Allison has been watering by hand ALL WEEK to keep things growing ... she could use some help ... anyone able to water either early morning or in the evening ... this would be fabulous! Allison is also working on making a clear delineation between the lawn and the herb garden and has been coordinating efforts with Layne and Bob.

Layne repaired the spigot and the white pipe, mowed the garden lawn, and put the grass clippings into the compost pile. If you get a chance, check it out, it is cooking up a storm! Layne has added the garden lawn to his mowing schedule and will be putting the grass clippings into the compost on a regular basis. Our job is to keep the lawn free of debris.

Rick and Joan cleaned up the pile of trash and recyclables that had accumulated at the west end of the garden lawn. That is all cleared away. They also spread out the drip system (not connected yet) in an effort to see what we have and where it needs to go. The main hose for the drip system is connected to the white pipe up in the north east corner behind the raised bed. Rick is going to purchase a female-to-female connector so we can connect the hose to the pipe, and then we will get the drip system in its correct place. We are doing this all by “discovery” – so if anyone has any actual information about where the hose was laid originally, that would be very helpful.

Rick spread out one of the drip systems on the lawn side of the garden just to get an idea of the size and thinking that it might be needed for the herbs. BUT if the herbs are being watered by the sprinklers, we may not need to worry about that at all. We should hear from Layne about that this week. We will roll up the lawn drip system on Monday.

Margie did more tilling and planting on Sunday, preparing the area nearest the playground for pumpkin planting. Margie has been awesome – tilling, planting, and advising. We wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without Margie’s help.

A separate list of more things to do will follow.

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.

Too Wet to Till - But Alternatives Available (TWTT - BAA )

April 26th is upon us, but it has rained in the past 4 days, so -- we will not be tilling the garden on Saturday, April 26th. But I do have some good news, Wasatch Community Gardens has a tiller which we can use as soon as the soil looks like it is tillable. But, there is no garden meeting, no garden tilling, and no garden party this weekend.

However, if you would like to do some garden-related work, here are some additional ideas/opportunities:

• help the CCNS Nursery School (housed in the RE Building during the week) -- their Landscape Committee will be doing some work in the church's playground area on Saturday morning, April 26th, 9-11 am or so
• pull out your dandelion weeding tool and weed the garden lawn, the church lawn, the house lawn, and/or the playground lawn - this is part of an effort to reduce the need for application of chemicals on the church's lawns
• rake some more straw off the garden - we cleared most of it, but not all - whatever is left, we plan to just till into the soil along with some compost - raked straw should either be bagged or placed up against the fence on the north side of the garden
• take a look at our garden blog [ http://gardenslcuu.blogspot.com/ ] and write an admiring and supportive comment or record any additional work you do in the garden
• start some tomato or pepper or other plants from seed in pots at home - we will need some "already started" plants when we are ready to plant -- if you need pots, there are a bunch behind the compost pile on the south side of the garden

What we still need:

• seeds and starters
• compost

One bit of disappointing news, our garden mailing list was a casualty of the church's move to a new web site. I will need to set up a new list - probably a Yahoo group. I will contact you with that information as soon as it is set up.

Straw, Straw, Straw

Three of us (Joan, Bob, and Bob's dog) worked on Saturday afternoon, clearing straw.


On the left is what the straw looked like at the beginning of April. When Bob and I started raking on Saturday, Becky had already made some marvelous straw piles which we were able to just bag. (Thank you, Becky!)


We raked and bagged 10 bags of straw (right). And unearthed a number of hoses and rocks, and a treasure or two!




And while it seemed like we bagged a lot of straw, there is more.

But we are hoping that what is left on top of the garden can be tilled into the soil. And that what is on the side of the garden can be used as ground cover to discourage the weeds.

Melanie's Magnificent Work (and some suggestions)

Melanie gardened for 3 hours this week and reported:

"I reclaimed the iris/tulip garden in the parking strip farthest north of the church- for which the neighbor next door was extremely grateful. "

"Learned some of the history of the garden. Hope to get more information both from CCNS and the church archives about which trees were planted as memorials for people. Just this one garden took a lot longer than I realized because it had to be done by hand because of the delicate tulip leaves, and also to pull out the grass. I did discover a lot of stones I used as a semi border."

"I also decided to "reclaim" the flagstone holding wall between the sidewalk and garden fence (photo is the "before" picture). I was in the process of this- and almost done- when my hand shovel broke. I took that as a sign that 3 hours was enough. Just as I was leaving I saw someone had left a big shovel against the shed, so I was able to reset even the 2 large flagstones that had meandered to the straight up position (by shoveling out a lot of dirt behind them). I didn't get to the rest of the parking strip. As I was leaving I also noticed that the garden just south of the church was in need of pruning the dead branches off the perennials- it was hard to see the spring bulbs blooming underneath them."

"I hated to leave the parking strip undone, so tonight I went back, and finished trimming the garden to the south of the church entry (south of Eliot Hall), and then reclaimed the other 2 gardens in the parking strip and raked the lawn. After 2 hours, and fading sunlight I was finally done! So- aside from weeding the garden in front of the fence- the "front" is done."

"I have a neighbor who has given me a ton of different kinds of seeds, some of them 1-2 years old- when you are ready let me know and I will bring them for you to look through for the garden. The garden in front of the garden fence, by the sidewalk, would be awesome planted in flowers. I would be willing at a later date to even weed the grass out of it if someone were to donate some flats of flowers for planting. (As long as I can water the area to make the grass easier to remove)."

"I brought lawn/leaf bags and rebagged some of the ones I had done on Sunday, and used the old clear trash bags to triple bag the rest- so they should be sturdy enough."

"This time I brought a broom to sweep off the sidewalk- if anyone is going to do more gardening in front of the garden fence a broom is most helpful."

"Hopes this allows the rest of you gardeners to focus on the garden behind the fence. "