Hi All,
Hope everyone had a great weekend! Tod and I went to a Camellia show in Modesto this Saturday. There were so many different varieties, who would’ve thought!?! We did not buy any of them though because all the ones we really liked were not available. Did you know that if you grow a Camellia from seed you will not get the same one? You need to get a cutting and either root it up in water or graft it! That is one new thing I learned this weekend!
Yesterday the South Hive was split and will hopefully form a new hive! They had enough eggs for us to take from the main hive and put in to a new hive. From there the bees will create a new Queen from one of the eggs to begin the hive! We will know in about a month if there is a new Queen-we will start seeing eggs and small larvae to let us know the bees were successful!
Last week in the garden BofA was out to help us continue work for the Plant Sale! Part of the crew helped Aditi with weeding out the path leading up to the Big Hoop House where we will be holding the sale. A few of that crew helped Brenda for a bit to move plants over to the Big Hoop House from the Little Hoop House. The rest of the crew helped me & our crew of regular volunteers continue planting beans and they all started planting cucumber, squash & melon seeds-over 1,000 seeds were started that day. They were a fun crew to work with!
Kaleidoscope was out both Thursday and Friday. Thursday they helped Kelly & Aditi cut some mesh to cover the newly planted seeds to protect from the marauding mice! They also helped to water in our trees that are waiting for their spots in the new expansion, placed shredded paper on the worms in the bin to help protect them from the heat and cleaned labels so we can use them for our plants. Friday’s crew filled up 35 flats of 4” pots-that is 560 pots filled with soil from 7 bags!
Thanks to Kaleidoscope between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning shifts they used those pots up! Luckily Friday afternoon shift filled up another 67 flats of 4” pots for us to use this week! Yup, we will be continuing planting seeds this week and potting up anything else that needs to go in to a 4” pot.
Totals for last week-1,757 seeds were started and 1,764 plants transplanted in to their final pots for the Sale! The seeds we are starting now in the 4” pots will stay in them for the Sale, as well as the 4 packs we started the beans in last week.
Help continued in the Orchard, mostly weeding right now. Some weeding was done garden wide and Lance continued his concentration of weeding out the thistle in the P beds.
Expansion work also continued. Brenda and SG worked on some irrigation on Tuesday and Saturday AW & TE continued the irrigation work with NL joining them. Whoever was not working on starting seeds helped the Enriques continue the sheet mulching of the expansion.
We harvested just over 160# of produce to send in to our local food pantries!
Thank you all for showing up and helping out!!!
Take care
Lori