Hi All,
Meet Amy!
Hi everyone! I’m Amy, the new staff member here. I grew up in Georgia and have a degree in Comparative Literature from UGA (like an English major, but world literature.) I’ve been in Livermore since 2003. When my first kid was born in 2005 I was lucky enough to be able to stay home with him and eventually his brother. I had a lot of different jobs before kids, including lab assistant (mostly washing test tubes), ice cream store manager (I scooped my way to the top), stagehand, cashier, barista, and health food store buyer/receiver. In the mid 90s I worked on a few small organic farms in Maryland, so I have a bit of long-ago farm experience. My most recent paying job was with Open Heart Kitchen, in the early 2000s. I planned the menus, ordered the ingredients, and supervised the volunteers cooking and serving. It’s fun that now I help to grow vegetables for Open Heart! When I worked there, Fertile Groundworks didn’t exist yet, and we served a lot of bagged salads, frozen vegetables, and canned fruit salad. It was the only way to stay within our budget. But now they get all kinds of fresh stuff from us! I’m excited to be working here and look forward to getting to know everyone. I am a slow learner of names but I will try my best!
Last week in the garden;
Kaiser was out to help in the garden. They got right to it helping us all harvest while learning about which vegetable to take and which to leave. Once harvest was complete they split up to help us complete our chores! Amy took part of the crew and planted 160 Japanese Giant Red mustard out in bed P13, placing strawberry baskets on to protect the seedlings from birds and watered them in. Another part of the crew joined Brenda in wiring up the Irrometer over by the Native Western Hedgerow and over by Pump Shed #1. Enrique had a larger crew out helping him to dig ditch for more of the Irrometer work continuing throughout the garden. They were a hard working crew that helped us get a lot done that day! Thank you kaiser Crew!
Leif’s Crew was back out helping in the garden. They helped to weed out bed N08 and the path along both sides of the bed. Laura’s Pleasanton Transition Class is joining us in the garden again this year! They were out to help continue weeding out the N beds and the paths in between, N08-N13. Thank you to both Crews for coming out to help I the garden!
Kaleidoscope was out and busy helping in the garden. They got going cleaning labels and helping to harvest cherry tomatoes for one of the local schools to share with their students.
LLNL was also out to work on a project in the garden. They installed 5 soil sensor monitors (biodegradable sensor + thermocouples for ground truth). These will specifically measure soil temperature which have successfully tested in their lab and their small plot of garden. Installing them in the Fertile GroundWorks garden helps them to move into real world experience!
We had noticed last Friday that the Office steps were getting pretty loose. This past week Kelly got busy working on the steps to balance them back out and support them. JA joined him and they got the steps all fixed up before the shift was even a quarter done! Kelly also ran to the store to pick up new tread and got the stairs retreaded for safety during our cold Winters which ends up freezing the steps and makes them slippery! Thanks guys!
DB was busy in the Orchard with supporting the shed that is out there. He moved the shed out of the spot it was in so he could dig out the ground, placed bricks, leveled and then replaced the shed back on so it would have a solid foundation to keep it level. Great Job DB!
SM was out in the expansion with one of our new families in the garden planting acorns for future oak trees! This is the area out by the old tree stump and where our new owl box is located. That section and the section to the East of that is all going to be planted in Native plants to continue helping our bees.
Speaking of bees. Our North Hive has been a bit on the defensive side lately and we are now in the plans to requeen the hive. We will go in to the hive, take out the current Queen and replace her with a new Queen that has been mated with a gentle drone. We suspect that the current Queen mated with an aggressive drone and that is why they have been so defensive this Summer.
Our regular crew of volunteers were out continuing work in the N beds. They got out there and caged up the tomatillo plants or took them out altogether to make room for the plants that were purposefully planted there this year. We have a lot of tomatillos throughout the garden doing this and we mostly try to leave them in unless they are getting in the way of other veggies. That same crew helped the rest of the crew to filled up 12 flats of 6 packs with soil so we can start some broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage seeds that we do not get from Valley Transplant.
Over 1,000 assorted broccolis, cauliflower & cabbages were started! Amy said many hands helped out on this project!
The P beds were also taken care of by our crew of regular volunteers. They got right out there and pulled out ALL the wild radish plants to make room for our vegetable plants that were struggling under the size of the wild radish plants and found bindweed & pigweed to pull out as well! Garden Wide they worked on propping up tomato cages that were knocked over by the wind and tucked squash plants into the beds to be sure they would not get walked on in the paths.
437.51# of produce was harvested for our local food pantries last week! Great job continuing to help our neighbors receive fresh produce!
Thank you everyone for showing up and helping out!
Take care
Lori