Today at the Garden

For our first garden skill share today, Ilyse taught us how to harvest chamomile, which we will be using in oils and teas once they dry.

Our second garden skill share was on how to build a potato tower.

Christopher (left) and a neighbor named John (right) took a tour of the garden. John is a landscaping expert who wanted to provide some expertise and help in the garden.

Joseph, seen above, helped to take care of the worm bin. Above you can see him adding some soil so that the worms have adequate space (worms need about 2 feet of soil). Below is a photo of the newspaper we added to the bin full of soil and food scraps.

Check out what is growing at the garden:

Red mustard

Green and red succlants

Chamomile

Garlic

Last Monday at the garden.

Check out some of the photos below to see what happened at the garden last Monday. I was away the rest of the week, so I wasn't able to get any photos. But, I heard the garden had a great food party on Friday Nov. 26th, ensuring that those who didn't have other spaces to enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend would have a place to relax and eat together. This is just one more way our garden seeks to provide the feeling of home for those who participate.

Above, Finn and Gloria are thinning the green onions. This process helps the onions have more room to grow larger and also provided us with 4 pounds of onions for cooking and salads.

We continue to harvest many types of mint from our garden for teas and garnishes. The mint shown above in our potato sack fence garden are doing particularly well during this rainy season.

We continue to have strawberries in the garden. This is now the 5th harvest we've been able to get from this strawberry patch in the north lot of the garden.

We still continue to harvest enough produce each week to share salads at our Monday garden meetings (1pm). The salad is a great side with the soup that is donated by the Zen Center.

Our new hand painted garden signs were added to the fence to let people know our hours and mission.

NEN 2010 Award Ceremony

The Growing Home Community Garden was awarded the 2010 Neighborhood Empowerment Network Award for Best Community Challenge Grant Project. See images of our award, and certificates below:

Today at the Garden: Sealing the Shed

Today at the garden we sealed the mural on our shed. This was our final step in this project.

Today at the Garden

Today at the garden planted medicinal plants and produce in containers.

Ilyse, pictured to the left, helped us plant transplants from the rose scented geranium plants in our medicinal bed in tin painted tin cans. These cans will helped to make the neighborhood smell good (like roses) and because geraniums grow so quickly, it will also provide wind cover and shade for our garden. We also hope that the beautiful green plants on will beautify our chain link fence.

Finn, on the left, is our garden educator. Finn and four others planted produce in garden pots. The containers are a great low maintanence way to increace growing area in an urban environment.

We also harvested 2 pds of tomatoes today!

GHCG Wins 2010 NEN Award

The Growing Home Community Garden has won the 2010 Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) Best Community Challenge Grant Project Award which will be given out on November 17th, at City Hall at the 2010 NEN Awards in the North Light Court.

Event Details:

6pm to 7pm - Reception (A light supper buffet will be served)

7pm to 7:45pm - Awards Ceremony

7:45pm to 8:30pm - Reception

The event is free. You can register here: http://2010nenawards.eventbrite.com/
We hope to see you there!

Last Friday at the Garden

We started clearing away the dying snow peas from the fences. Then, the stalks were hauled down to our compost bins (above), where a group of homeless volunteers chopped the stalks into small enough pieces to get composted (below).
As the winter and rain approaches our garden will have less and less work that needs to be completed on our site, we're thinking about doing some work at some other nearby sites to get their spaces ready for gardening, adding more vertical garden areas to our fences so we have more spaces for planting or about doing some other construction projects to get us ready for the spring.