Hi All,
Aditi is writing our opening paragraph this week;
“Hey, everyone! If you’ve noticed that I’ve been MIA for the past 3 weeks, it’s because I just returned from an epic cross-country Amtrak trip using the USA Rail Pass. In total, I travelled ~4,000 miles over 80 hours by train across 2 weeks, stopping in various cities to meet friends and sightsee. My favorite city was Chicago, where I saw two conservatories, biked along the lakefront trail, and heard some live jazz music. I even had some time to volunteer at a community garden out in New York, which was a really fun experience (especially since their growing season is a month or two behind ours). I’m also very excited to share that I got into the Stanford Medicine Postbaccalaureate program that I applied to last month. 
I’ll spend one to two years conducting research in a Stanford lab of my choice (I’m looking for labs focused on Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration) before exploring graduate school options. Thank you all SO much for the well-wishes during the interview process; they were greatly appreciated! I’ll only head to the South Bay in mid-August, so I’ll still have some time out in the garden with you all! “
In the garden last week….
UNCLE was back out to help us continue our work! They jumped right in and started helping Brenda and Aditi glean out bed AB34 of all the onions and any leftover cabbages to send to the food pantries. Next they got to weeding it out so they can prep it up. After prepping they switched out the irrigation hoses and planted it with squash; Astia, Spaghetti & Sunburst. They were also able to help plant bed M10 with Rosa Bianca eggplant and Greek oregano. That is good because we only have 1 other bed with oregano! Thank you UNCLE!
Leif and his School crew were back out and this time the weather was much nicer! Last time they were all out just as they were finishing up the sky dumped buckets of rain on us! Whilst in the garden they helped Kelly this time with prepping bed K06. They hustled to help finish up placing the fertilizer on, watering it in and then getting the compost over to finish it up. The rest of the crew helped me to harvest lettuce from some overgrown 6 packs, compost the soil that they were in and packed up onions to send in to the food pantries. Thanks team!
Pleasanton Transition was out and helped to weed out 2 beds and the pathways around them. This will help us save time when we prep those 2 beds! Kaleidoscope was out as well, continuing their work on the compost bins. They size reduced greens and filled bin #1 about 1/2 way with the lasagna method. Peas & Me got busy planting beds for us last week! KA & CA got busy planting beans in beds B03 & B04-Yard Longs and Kentucky Wonders! CA also helped Brenda out in the P beds to uncover the trees! RJ and her crew of 5 sons helped me to plant bed AB08 with cherry tomatoes we will be harvesting for the schools and bed B17 with 30 Jalapeños on the East end. It was their first time volunteering in the garden so we did a quick tour of the new beds to show them how big the garden was getting! Her eldest son helped Brenda and CA with uncovering the trees. Such great help with these crews each week!
There was so much that got done in the garden last week that I don’t know where to start!
Orchard-2 of our regular Wednesday volunteers showed up Tuesday to work with Dean & Crew in the Orchard to learn what needs to be done. They joined the Orchard Crew What’s App group so they can stay informed on what is needing to be done in the Orchard each week. During their visit they helped to weed out the Orchard and helped Dean with pruning back some fire blight on a Quince tree!
Bees! The bees are doing great, the new hive is continuing to grow, the North hive looks like they are finally getting their mite issue under control and we harvested more honey from the South Hive last week! Back in March we had moved a pop up back there to offer some shade from the heat and the pop up got blown over to our neighbor’s yard the other day. We went over to meet the neighbors so we could retrieve our pop up-they were not home but the pop up is back in our possession. It got a little beat up so there is some work needing to be done on it.
JR returned from his trip to Vietnam and Cambodia with his lovely wife. Even with jet lag he turned up at the garden last week and helped out. He got the irrigation spool fixed to make it easier to work with the irrigation hoses and he got right back to sweeping up the Tool Trailer-it looks so nice!!!
CW is working with Brenda on building Fertile GroundWorks an owl box for one of the grants we applied for. Kelly & CW headed over to Home Depot last week to get the supplies CW is needing to complete the project!
Another 4 beds were prepped and are now ready for planting. 3 more beds had trellises installed for future plantings and a tunnel was created for beds M15 & M16 for the bitter melon plants that were planted in them this week!
Aditi had a busy week back at work getting beds prepped and this weekend she learned how to drive the tractor! Her and AW worked on mowing the field and expansion which will help us keep weed seeds from continuing to spread! Yes, I do realize that there are SO many weeds throughout the garden but any help is welcomed in keeping it at bay!!!
All that harvesting and gleaning out the beds got 493.87# of produce sent in to our local food pantries last week!
Thank you all for coming out and continuing the work to get fresh produce on our neighbors tables:)
Take careLori