Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Moving some dirt around...


building our garlic berm - drew freeman, oct 2012 

We've been busy this month, what with getting our free-form raised bed built and planted with garlic. Thanks to some new helping hands at Drew Freeman, we should be well stocked with garlic come warm weather!

Thanks, too, to STEER Center's new volunteer coordinator, Damian, for his help today getting our fourth raised bed filled with dirt and ready for fall planting.

jessica and damian move some soil - drew ms oct 2012

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Getting ready for cold weather


There's nothing like hauling around piles of compost and building raised garden beds to get the blood flowing on a sunny autumn day. Luckily, while Jessica was busy showing folks around the garden and snapping photos, Chris helped me lay out burlap and haul buckets of soil to start building the free-form raised bed which we'll be using to plant lots of local, organic garlic into next week.




You can't tell from the photo, since we hadn't started moving the compost yet, but we got quite dirty by the end, and once Nigel stopped by to help us out it was actually pretty fun. (Boy, did I sleep well after all of that manual labor!)

It wasn't all digging and hauling around buckets, though. When Ms. Pierre stopped by, we checked out the progress of the kale and strawberries, pulled up some of the overgrown radishes and weeds for the compost bin, and even dug up some of the beets and a single (giant) carrot from the round bed we'd planted in early summer. Yum!


Hope we can bring some more students out for our regular Tuesday workdays (1:30-3:30pm). I mean, we've got digging and planting to do. Plus somebody needs to make sure the strawberries are eaten before the frost. Yes, they're fruiting again!