What a great and challenging summer it's been!
Next work time: Monday evening ~5:30PM
We will harvest peppers, okra, and beans. We may do some clean-up tasks to get ready for plans that we have for 2023. Speaking of 2023…
Fall Meeting 2022
We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago at Tom’s house. Here is the gist of what we discussed:
We may not grow summer squash next year to see if we can break the squash vine borer cycle for 2024.
We may reorganize our plans to focus on assigning leaders to different garden tasks.
We have already started collecting data to determine the number of “person hours” assigned to various tasks.
We are considering installing an irrigation timer. Some risks include the possibility of leaks in our irrigation hook-up.
In order to reduce weeding tasks we plan to order some sort of high durability ground covering such as “Lumite”. We may receive some samples to test it out soon.
Varieties to grow: Beans (pole varieties), tomatoes (2 or three varieties, not too big, not too small), peppers (bell, jalapeno, sweet banana, lunchbox), okra, lettuce (romaine, other), kale, collards, cilantro/parsley, cucumber and probably some more.
Cover crop plan at SMOR: We planted mostly triticale, austrian winter pea, hairy vetch, and crimson clover on open beds. Underneath the okra and peppers, we planted some older seed (cereal rye or oats, vetch, and winter peas) that may get established. We plan to allow these crops to get as mature as possible in Spring before terminating them and then planting the summer crops into the residue.
Cover crop plan at Isidore and Maria garden: Sow triticale, pea, vetch, and clover by mid-October. We plan to till the crop in with a quick shallow pass. If we do it this week, we might get rain on Thursday. Otherwise we are wondering if our drip line will be enough to irrigate this cover crop. We will see….
We plan to have a few smaller meetings to celebrate successes and hash out details on some items that were not discussed.
A new layout. In this layout we will install three permanent raised beds on the east edge of the garden. These will not get washed out in our June storms. The remaining 7 beds are more narrow. After a couple of years of intense spacing in wider beds, we recognize that we may benefit from wider spacings to make weeding and harvesting easier. Also we hope that this format will allow volunteers to move around a little bit easier during the main season when things get crowded. Note the the far west edge (on the right hand side) will be reserved for perennial crops and other fun things that growers want to try.
Last week we harvested all of the butternut and candy roaster squash from the Isidore and Maria garden. We will store these crops for several weeks and hand them out at the pantry over time. We will start harvesting sweet potatoes over the next few weeks.
Butternut $3 each
Candy roaster $5 each
Oliver near a massive butternut and candy roaster squash harvest at the Isidore and Maria garden.
Tom noticed that I was taking this picture!
