Hi All,
This weekend my eldest and her hubby were in Livermore and we got to see them yesterday! We all went for a walk at Sycamore Grove-SO many memories from when her and my youngest were little:) Ariel mostly remembers all the rattle snakes she has seen on our walks in Sycamore! Her hubby, Ian, had a friend join us at the park for a bit so we got to meet him and chat for a bit…we actually have met his mom while birding over in Springtown, lol!!! Afterwards we went to Extreme Pizza, new joint on the corner of Concannon and Holmes, pretty decent pizza with all kinds of fixings! They took off yesterday afternoon to beat the holiday traffic so today Tod and I are doing a lot of clean up around the house! I hope everyone had a Happy Memorial Day!
Last week in the garden;
Stanford and Essex were out last week to help in the garden. Stanford helped start weeding out the P beds, getting in to beds P13-P15 and getting them mostly weed free and bed P8-P12 getting them about 50% weed free! They also helped to switch out irrigation lines in bed K07 as well as plant K06 & K07 with opo and peppers! Essex helped the crew to prep bed P14, first gleaning out the broccoli and the amending with 12qts of gypsum fertilizer. They got lucky and did not need to shake & bake the bed since it is a not till-it was pretty darn warm Friday afternoon! Thanks to volunteer groups like these 2 we are able to get so much more accomplished!
Busy week with the Community Programs. The Pleasanton Transition Crew was out and helped weed out the area around bed G03, matched gloves that needed a mate and restacked the cardboard in front of the Asbury garden. York came out and filled the Go3 bed partially with soil needed to get the bed planted. Kaleidoscope was out right after and continued filling while another part of the crew cleaned labels. Enjoy Life More came in and finished filling bed G03 and had enough time left to get it planted with Provider beans! Go Teams Go!!!!
Speaking of bed G03…Kelly and CW were able to get it built back up on Tuesday which is why the Community Groups were able to get it filled and planted! Now G03 & G04 sit quite a lot higher thanks to Kelly and CW!
Peas & Me team of 3 were out and helped to plant 3 beds of tomatoes-beds M01 now has Lillian’s Yellow & Yellow Pear, K05 had the rest of the Mortgage Lifters planted & about 7 Rainbow Jazz to fill it up and N13 now has almost 60 Carbon tomato plants, every one of them all ready for harvesting this Summer! There was also a little bit of help given to Brenda weeding out bed P14 and they staked bed G03 since the beans were quite tall, needing assistance staying upright! We were able to water the beds in before the heat took them away! Very helpful crew of 3;)
While all that was going on our crew of regular volunteers were busy getting even more done! They helped to make sure the harvesting was completed, washed, packed and delivered to each food pantry! They also rolled up their sleeves and got busy working in the beds, getting another 9 beds planted-AB08 now has husk tomatoes, B16 & B17 more peppers, M13 now has melons (makes my mouth waster!) and E01 has more tomatoes-San Marzano’s! They were the ones that got K07 gleaned, weeded & prepped for planting. They gleaned out bed L01 getting it ready for prepping in the near future! Lance continued his hunt for thistle in the P beds!
CW has been busy getting supplies together to build an owl box for the garden. This one will go out towards the end of the Fertile GroundWorks property, far enough away from the old box we have on the East side of the Orchard. Keep an eye out on that old box, it may have owlets in it! Brenda found some broken eggs on the ground next to the box! We haven’t seen any movement when we checked in but maybe it was the wrong time of day!
As mentioned above, the P beds are starting to get prepped. P14 had trees planted in it! There is a Cara Cara orange, Keffir lime, Oro Blanco grapfruit and 3 medlar trees-Royal, Picu & Nefle Tardive. Not only will these produce fruit for our food pantries but they will offer some shade where there is none to be had! P12 was also prepped and is awaiting planting!
Looks like 2 of our tomato beds got taken out by…we don’t really know! AB09 and L02 were missing a lot of tomato plants that were just recently planted so Saturday’s crew got in there and replaced what was lost!
Oh hey, by the way, Aditi learned how to drive the tractor last weekend so now we can hit her up for any tractor help the garden needs during the week;)
All that and so much more got done in the garden last week! On top of it all you harvested 358# of produce to send in to our local food pantries! Just an FYI, last year we sent in a record of over 32,000# of produce and we are tracking this year to break that record!
Thanks to all of your efforts coming out each week and whenever you have the time to come help in the garden, we are able to continue the work of getting fresh produce to our local community!
Take care
Lori