Hi All,
Sorry for the late email, this week has been BUSY!
The Tuesday shift got together after the shift to share lunch in the Church courtyard! GL & LL planned it out and got the party started! This was all after they came in and prepped 2 beds, gleaned & weeded another, worked a tunnel between beds K06 & K07 as well as planted 2 trees in the Orchard on top of harvesting, washing and packing over 230lbs of produce to send in to the pantries! CW even went, made the delivery, picked up his wife and came back to join in on the fun! It is so wonderful seeing our volunteers not only enjoy working with one another but also getting to hang out and enjoy each others’ company…fills my heart
Throughout the rest of the week another 4 beds were prepped, another 7 beds planted bringing us to over 9,000 plants in the ground so far with just about 1,400 left to go! We are coming close to having all the beds planted!!! As of today we have 17 more beds to glean, weed, amend & compost, 1 other needing side dressing and another 1 needing the weeds finished off before we prep it! Think we can get it done within the next 2 weeks?
Critters in the garden! The momma fox we have determined has mange. We are working on getting her medicine to clear it up as well as her little kits running around. Brenda has seen at least 3 kits running around!!! Qaadira helped Brenda on Saturday to set up an area where they can feed the medicine to either momma or the babes. It is working! They are taking the medicine! Gophers on the other hand we have been setting traps for and have caught a few. A couple of our volunteers, CL & RM, are helping to keep the gopher population down with the Gopher Sound Repellent. There is one over by the Berry Patch and I remember seeing another one out by the N beds. I believe that is all we have out there. I will ask next week when I see them again.
The office is getting filled up with our seed garlic. JT & EL helped out last week getting them tied up in order for them to be hung. It smells wonderful in there right now! The garlic that hangs in the office is the same garlic we use for planting in the Fall. Just imagine, not only are you helping us to send food into the local pantries but you are also helping us to continue that mission with these seed garlics!
A shout out to the Wednesday crew for getting the rest of the tomato cages on AB32! The week before we had run out of time after the Wednesday crew had planted AB28 & AB32 with tomatoes and were able to get AB28 caged in but only half of AB28 caged in. Thank you SB, SB & NO for getting that chore done! We have been able to cage up the tomatoes this year before they get too big!
All that, and more, and we harvested almost 800lbs of produce for our local pantries:) The onions are coming on strong and we will probably see big numbers like this for the next 2 weeks and once the onions are harvested we will see a drop for a little while until the tomatoes start coming on!!! Yup, tomato season is just around the corner;)
Thank you all for continuing what you are doing here in the garden.
Take care
Lori