garden 5

vegeNew intergenerational fellowship group! Ages 7 to 87 are invited to attend.
Tending a gardening is a daily activity, just like tending to our faith. Beginning Saturday, August 23 meet weekly with Nancy Borkman through the end of October in the Erik Peterson Memorial Garden and monthly indoors in non-growing season. You can choose between two regularly scheduled gardening times every week to accommodate your busy lives – whichever one you feel fits your schedule better.

Various topics of discussion will center on the similarities between tending a garden and tending to our faith. Each gathering will have a topic focus to learn more about an aspect of growing a garden that corresponds with a faith application. With discussion there will be the usual garden tending activities of picking vegetables, watering, weeding, the how-tos of seed propagation, plant selection, direct sowing, transplanting, digging, harvest schedules, frost protection and general maintenance.

Tuesdays from 6:45 to 7:45 o’clock p.m. (adjusted for light as the fall progresses) and Saturdays from 8:30 to 9:30 o’clock a.m. One topic each week. Monday’s topic will repeat on Saturday.

Refreshments like donuts or coffee cake and a beverage (temperature appropriate for the weather) will be provided.

Greetings and Groundhogs!

NEWSFLASH – A fence-climbing, vegetable-chomping ground hog has been seen invading the Garden. For now, flashy pinwheels have been stuck into each bed and strings of shiny ribbon will be suspended to keep this and other varmints at bay.  (Ground hogs are protected and cannot be moved.)

The rest of the warm weather and seed crops were planted June 15th.  Seed sprouting of second crops are in the works. Currently, we have cantaloupe, cucumbers, Swiss chard, zucchini, and green beans joining the peppers and tomatoes.  Many thanks to Bob Peterson who constructed our four new raised beds!  Thank you to all of you who donated the lumber, soil, peat, and manure for the new beds.  A thanks also goes to Art Nikkel who tilled in the peat/manure into the soil.

We have already picked the first shoots of broccoli and green onions, plus there’s been two spinach harvests.  The green on the red beets and golden beets are 2-5 inches high.

The LCC Garden is a fellowship activity geared toward service.  If you enjoy the outdoors, think that soil is a lovely fragrance, want to learn to grow vegetables, or just like watering or pulling weeds, then this is for you.  All are welcome to tend the garden – veterans and newbies alike. The Garden gets watered everyday usually before 8:00 a.m. and always before 10:00 a.m.  Picking usually gets done in the evening between 6:30 and 7:30 pm.  Picked produce is washed and bagged, then refrigerated, before it is delivered to international students at Trinity International University  the next day or so. (These families at live on very tight budgets, and this outlet matches the size of our garden well.)

Nancy

Our 2014 garden layout will be available for viewing on the webpage along with planting date-harvest date guidelines.  The 8 beds have been moved toward the north and south sides of the fenced area to create space for 4 new raised beds down the center, making a total of. This year we are growing cool and warm weather vegetables. The cool ones are spinach, romaine lettuce, pac choi, napa cabbage, kale, broccoli, red beets, yellow beets, and bunching onions; and, the warm ones are zucchini, yellow squash, butternut squash, cherry tomatoes, green, red, and yellow peppers, yellow beans, green beans, carrots, swiss chard, and cucumbers.

Usually we manage to get the cool weather crops of spinach and lettuce planted sometime in mid-April.  Well, when we started working in the garden on April 28th, we already had several ready-to-pick, volunteer bunches of spinach!  That was a surprise because a spinach plant goes from germination to harvest in 42 days. So, if you do the math, it means those spinach seeds probably germinated in mid-March (you’ll remember that it was still a bit snowy then!  Those 3 volunteer seedlings taught us to plant the cool weather crops in March!

We are in need of volunteers to water, weed, and harvest.  Nancy Borkman is available if you have questions to teach best practices for watering and harvesting – such as water in the morning before 10:00 am or pick cucumbers daily once fruit is 5 inches long.  Watering and picking instructions will be available at the garden in a cooler within the garden. A sign-up sheet for watering will be posted online again this year.

This year, because of the unique production capacity of the garden, we’ve chosen to donate our produce to support the limited budgets of the International students with families at Trinity International University.  Delivery and distribution of harvests will be two-three times a week.  Volunteers for making deliveries would also be welcome.

Nancy Borkman