Hi All,
I am learning how to knit! My bestie and I asked a friend of ours to teach us and she agreed to do it! Currently she has us working on our knit stitch. She showed us the purl stitch but we decided we would just practice our knit stitches for now! So far it has not tightened up on me-I am very excited about that because that is what normally happens. Yesterday Tod went with one of his birding buddies to do the yearly bird count for San Joaquin County. I stayed home because last year I went and was miserable in the cold. I was happy to stay behind and get caught up on house cleaning! I love to have a clean house for the Holidays leading in to the New Year!
In the garden last week, ya’ll were ON IT! I am not even sure how to begin because everyone stepped up in getting chores done/started/continued!!!
The past 2 weeks we have all been concentrating on getting the P beds weeded out so we can get them prepped and planted before Christmas. There were so many weeds that we ended up filling the garden and church green waste bins before we were even half way through. When the garbage truck showed up to pick up the green waste the whole crew got to refilling the bin 4X, for a total of 6 bins of weeds heading in to the city compost pile!
Gophers have been wreaking havoc across the garden. Brenda & volunteers have been out setting traps anywhere they see the gopher mounds. The fox has been out and making meals out of the trapped gophers. Brenda & I on Wednesday watched as she set off a trap in one bed while there was a gopher we laid out in another bed! I walk dover and tossed the gopher in her direction, she was a very grateful fox!
Brenda picked up a load of seed meal on Monday and Tuesday the crew helped to put up the bags. Tuesday and Wednesday saw bags of coyote sachets going up to deter the rodents from coming in and devouring the meal! The plan is to hang more ratchets throughout the other shelves to keep them out of the container entirely…fingers crossed! The rest of the fertilizer supplies landed in the garden by Friday afternoon shift. Brenda, Kelly & the 2 Enriques, along with VW cleaned out, organized and restocked the supplies on to the steel shelves.
The birds have been at the greens we are growing in the newly planted beds. CL covered part of bed K05, and new kale plants, with aground since we ran out of the strawberry baskets which she placed in beds M01 & M04, after planting more chard in both beds, while LP & KB placed them over plants in bed AB34, after planting cabbages in the bed…yes, there are that many plants in those 3 beds that we ran out of strawberry baskets!
Lance took to mallow weeding throughout the week! He got in to much of the front end of the garden in extricating them from the soil! Beds A01-B06, AB07-AB10, C01-F02, L01-M04, K05-K07 & A13-B15 are freed from the mallow takeover! SV was back in the garden and she helped to inventory our 4” pots-counted almost 4,000 pots! This is helping us to prepare for the Plant Sale which we will be concentrating on in the New Year! A new volunteer on Saturday helped us to update our computer settings so it would stop trying to connect to 2 different networks! Hopefully this will stop the disconnect that everyone experiences!
P beds-
Weeding continued on beds P13-P15 (we rearranged the order of the beds to keep up with the order of the other beds! It is no longer P01-P08, it is now P08-P15!). P08, P09 & P11 were all prepped and planted last week. P08 was planted with Marathon broccoli & Uzbek garlic. P09 was planted with Capitola Brussel sprouts & Cal White garlic. P11 was planted with Green Magic broccoli & more Cal White garlic.
A toad was found in bed P15! Brenda initially thought he was a mushroom and when touched he deflated and she saw his eyes! Luckily he survived the onslaught of weeding and the Saturday crew placed a tomato cage around him to protect him from future works! The GLIFY kids also placed soil back on top of the toad along with a blanket of weeds and straw to keep him happy! Enrique Garcia got a couple of shots of the toad and shared them with me just a little bit ago to share with you all!
As of this past Saturday the P beds are now weedless! The “last” dumpster full of weeds will be picked up! We also bought more tree covers in order to get all the other surviving trees covered for Winter! Yay, go team!
Not too bad for the end of the year, 88.19# of produce was harvested and sent in to the pantries last week! We also sent in more Trombetta squash and sun chokes from the week before!
Thank you all for coming out and helping us get all those chores completed!
Take care
Lori
