Happy Monday everyone,
I hope you all had great weekends. Case and I spent yesterday with my mom- she says hi all! and is doing fine. She is loving the added stability of her new knee brace. Oh la la it is so fashionable. I got to eat my first lychees today-thank you AK for bringing them to the board meeting. YUMMY!!! So glad we are trying to grow them out in our wish garden.
Boy do I miss Lori. Thank you all for muddling thru her absence with me and braving the climbing temperatures last week. Despite the lack of Lori’s lovely laugh we managed to get a lot done. We were able to find 150 pounds of fresh produce to harvest and accompany 227 pounds of onions and 50 pounds of garlic from the box shed in our deliveries to our partners.
Even with the heat, and with help from teams from SEWA,Workday, NCL, BTC and GLIFY, we got 1,340 square feet more of beds getting fully prepped, and another 300 sq ft bed done to the point of just needing to add fertilizer and compost to finish it. YAY!
As we stayed “cool” , we got 1,333 herb, cucumber, eggplant, greens, melon, pepper and tomato seedlings plus three trees planted into all the beds we prepped this week and last. The hoop houses are emptying quickly. WAHOOO! We also pulled tons of weeds including from the Western native hedgerow, harvested radish seed, and put in a zillion tomato cages to cover some of the 670 tomato plants that we have planted. So many tomatoes caged, that we ran out of the “easy’ to pull cages so CE & EE spent Saturday morning freeing our last 3 stacks of tomato cages from evil bind weed and clipped them to be ready to put out over more tomato seedlings.
Out in the orchard our learning about ground squirrels continues, who knew they climb trees despite their name? I didn’t. They are also smarter than I gave them credit for. We tied fruit bags around the baby stone fruits to protect them from the birds and the ground squirrels- alas the little buggers climb the trees and have figured out if they chew on the fruits’ stems down will come bag fruit and all! Cayenne pepper soaked bags? We forgot to compare fruit retention in the trees we hung coyote satchets in with those we didn’t. Looking forward to that observation chore this week along with fixing any holes in the fencing we can find. Yep they are not digging under the buried hardware cloth so much as using it as a ladder to be able to reach the plastic deer fencing and chewing thru that. We are thinking solar panel powered zapper units on the hardware cloth, more stinky stuff maybe sticky? Open to suggestions on what has worked for you all.
I couldn’t have made it through without all of your happy hardworking voices ringing thru the garden. Thank you for being you and giving so much of yourselves to the garden.
With gratitude,
Brenda