Today was the real beginning of the gardening season up at our community garden plots.
All of our plots are full again this year. Eighteen new gardeners joined us. We had our row cover sale today, and a work session cleaning out and preparing our 900 square foot food bank plots.
Sharps Farm provides us with row cover to sell to our gardeners. We pay the bulk prices to buy the cover then sell it at a very small markup to pay for our seedlings and seeds for the food bank plots. In other words, we round up the per foot price slightly. Still, 12 food wide row cover for 70 cents a foot is a tremendous bargain. They were doing a brisk business. We also held a “barn” sale on those items the food bank plots have accumulated as donations over the years from past gardeners. Mesh screens. Tomato cages. Trellis pieces. The extra “Surround” we bought last year. All told, it will help us finance our efforts to provide fresh vegetables to the Howard County Food Bank.
Today the food bank plots looked like this.
Weeding. Moving the hoops and changing where we will plant tomatoes. In July, it should look like this again.
We now train the tomatoes to grow between the rebar rows, as the cages just aren’t heavy enough to hold them. We plant vegetables that produce well, and that are easily prepared by those with limited resources. We have learned that rare and exotic vegetables don’t lend themselves to simple preparations. We grow huge amounts of carrots, beets, collards, kale, spinach, lettuces, garlic, tomatoes, zucchini and peppers. Last year we donated 1679 pounds of vegetables to the food bank. We were lucky to have an extra plot when someone had to give up theirs. This year, we are back to the original 900 square feet.
It’s good to see the weather changing, and to see all our gardening friends out there today. Here’s to another great harvest year.
AnnieRie Unplugged 