Hello everyone and happy Fall! I must say, I feel a bit bashful writing my article this month from the perspective of my new role. Please bear with me as I adjust. At our annual membership meeting in September, we installed our new board members for the next two years. It is heartwarming to see how so many gardeners have grown with our garden and grown into new leadership roles. We welcomed Mike Noble as our new Forest Garden Coordinator, Josh Thomas as our new Director of Digital Media & Communications, Diane Wilson as our new Secretary, Kathleen Willis as our Treasurer and Owen Smith and Frankie Hill as Garden Leaders. Paula Olesen moved to the Past President role and I will be serving our garden in the capacity of President. This is a wonderful team of professionals to work with and we look forward to leading the garden into more growth over the next two years.
Speaking of growth, we’ve already started in a profound way. In September, we graciously received an $8,000 Operations Grant through Homegrown Hillsborough. Huge sacks of soil from Big Earth have already been delivered and the remaining 12 Vego beds to complete our garden bed upgrades are in route. Those of us who haven’t been upgraded yet are super eager to plant our Fall goodies in one of those new beds. The much cooler weather will make this an easier project than it was over the dead heat of summer. We’ve also become quite the professionals at assembling and installing these beds and hope to have all 12 beds installed before holidays sneak up on us. A portion of the grant will also fund the addition of an outdoor kitchen. Who knows, maybe that will be a Christmas present to the garden. It would certainly make for a very fun holiday party this year.
Also in the growth category is finally having our own source of power and an enhanced security system. It was a learning process that took a few of us working together and took a bit longer than anticipated to get everything installed and functioning correctly, but we now have installed solar panels to generate our own electricity and a proactive security system to stop after hours trespassers who are less than kind to our garden space. This is an exciting new development that will power our ideas and projects into the future. This new power source will run a compost tea system and has the added capacity to power things such as lighting & sound for our holiday party, powered hedge trimmers that make trimming the East sidewalk nearly effortless and fans to move air when it is sweltering hot.
Over the summer our membership grew with many new additions and we are currently at 36 members. Now that the weather is cooling down, we are seeing an increase in first-time visitors and volunteers who wish to join and rent a plot, making our garden work days both productive and fun. There has been an enjoyable trend on our garden work days of folks bringing snacks and goodies to share akin to an impromptu, surprise potluck. There is not a whole lot in the garden to harvest and share at the moment, so enjoying things like homemade banana bread, donuts or the abundance of harvests from home gardens has made the wind down of our workdays quite enjoyable. We are finally starting to get some fruits come in little by little. We harvested quite a few Papaya from our very happy, very productive tree last week to share. The Barbados Cherry had some nice ripe fruit this week that quickly disappeared as people ate them right from the tree. The newly transplanted Strawberry Tree has set quite a bit of fruit and is still flowering. We should have some tasty little “buttered popcorn cotton candy” nuggets to enjoy soon if we can beat the squirrels to them.
This month Josh Thomas is leading a free two-part workshop learning series on how to build a Compost Tea System. On the 10th, we will learn how to build a compost tea system and get it working. On the 17th we will brew the compost tea and learn why this is so beneficial in an organic garden. I love that our garden is always working on different ways to create quality compost that improves soil health and garden productivity. With the installation of the Johnson-Su Bioreactor in late May and the addition of the Compost Tea system to the garden, we will now have two very powerful and novel ways to create and utilize compost to create better harvests while we all learn along the way.
Thanks to our amazing members and volunteers, we have a cornucopia of new plants started for the fall plant sale and are building a fantastic selection of high-quality stock. It takes a lot of work to create 2,000 or more plants for a specific sale date at a certain time of year. Over the summer we invested additional time into fruit tree seedlings and will have expanded inventory to offer in that category. In addition to vegetable garden starts, we will have Bananas, Mulberries, Jackfruit, Dragon Fruit, Green Curry, Moringa and more. Last fall, we set an all time record with our sale, and I’d like to break that record again.
We have a lot of fun ahead of us as we swing into one of my favorite growing and sharing seasons. The garden beds will start overflowing with abundance as the weather cools and the pest pressures subside. We will all get to know our new members as we take care of the garden together, build friendships and learn together. This garden is such a wonderful place to be and I am so grateful to have the privilege to share it and garden along side of each and every one of you.
I look forward to seeing everyone in the garden.
