Hi All,
Tod, my hubby, did a work trip up to Seattle this past weekend so I had extra time to spend with my bestie on Sunday! We lunched together, did some more shopping and got mani/pedi’s. It was so nice getting to catch up with her on all that happened for me last week and getting to share some insights we have both had over the past few months. Oh, and she turned me on to this book, “Hagitude”…sooo good!!! Check it out ladies and guys if you want more insight I think it would be worth a read! Tod came home yesterday and we went to our favorite Thai restaurant across the street from us for dinner to catch up on our weekend! When we got back home we had fun sharing our Spotify Stories of the Year getting to listen to some good music and then we vegged on the couch with Hells Kitchen before bedtime!
Last week in the garden:
Lisa from UNCLE was back out and helped to clean up the kale beds of all the old, powdery mildew leaves to help the plants continue giving us food to share with the pantries. Amazon was back out too and helping us with weeding out the P beds. There was a lot to weed out in the beds and the crew helped Brenda continue in beds P01, P02 & P03. Thanks to their help the Boy Scouts & PLAY on Saturday morning shift continued weeding out P01-P04 and got halfway through P05. In P05 the Boy Scout chaperone had the boys help him harvest popcorn and shared it with the PLAY group! The Girl Scouts came in for the Saturday afternoon shift, fixed a lot of leaks in the irrigation hoses as well as broke the ground for bed P01 and their chaperones continued weeding out P05! Very busy week for these crews!
Pleasanton Transition, York & Kaleidoscope came out to help us try to demolish the pile of branches over by the Compost Area. Thanks to these crews coming in and helping us to size reduce saved us so much time in the garden and made us better able to get the beds prepped and planted before the Thanksgiving holiday!
Still not completely out of the woods yet with prepping & planting the beds. Beyond the P beds there are a handful of other beds that still need to be done. C01 was prepped and planted last week with peas, beets & cabbage. M14 received a bit of side dressing, more Brussel sprouts planted and about 14 mystery garlic that the Tuesday volunteers found while side dressing the bed! Beds M01 & M04 chards were cleaned up and Natalie from Del Valle Culinary Arts class dropped off some butternut squash soup her students made with the squash we were able to share with them! It was hands down the best butternut squash soup I have ever had!
Bed M17 had the sweet potatoes gleaned out, K18 had more sun chokes gleaned out and both beds were prepped and planted! K18 was planted in more sun choke-we use the smaller roots to for new plantings. Bed M17 was planted in cauliflower, broccoli and garlic.
There was a small crew of littles who came out to the garden with their moms on Friday and they helped to feed the worms, place shredded paper on top of the pile and cover them up with new burlap bags. Afterwards the crew headed out to the P bed area and started helping to weed out the big path in front of the beds. All 3 of the littles helped me to bring up a wheelbarrow full of weeds before they took off for the evening to go enjoy the downtown Christmas festivities!
There are a lot of trees that survived the year in the P beds and we are covering them up with fabric bags to help them through this Winter. Tamarillo, dragonfruit and banana are a few that made it through so far. We will continue to cover the trees up as we get through the weeding, prepping and planting of the beds.
376# of produce was harvested for the pantries! We are currently holding on to the sweet potatoes, sun chokes and trombetta squash. The plan is to send half of what we have in this week to the pantries and the rest will go in next week before our Holiday break.
Thank you all for continuing to help us get all the work done in the garden for the produce to continue getting out to the pantries!
Take care
Lori