Garden meeting + We broke the pepper record and they’re still coming!
Butternut squashes from the Isidore and Maria garden keep on coming!
The mission of the St. Mary’s Community garden is to feed the hungry by growing fresh vegetables for our neighbors who come to the St. Joseph’s food pantry. This year we added the Isidore and Maria garden on Dutch Valley Road where we produce long season winter squash and some sweet potatoes in order to serve our neighbors longer into the winter.
We receive financial support from gardeners, parishioners at St. Mary’s Church, the Pope Francis Charitable Fund, the Council of Catholic Women, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Our main contributors are volunteers who work tirelessly throughout the year to plan, plant, weed, cultivate, and harvest these crops.
Sometimes the volunteers get to take a little of the food home.
Fall Planning Meeting 2022: Saturday, 9/24/2022, 1-3PM at Tom Thornton’s house. Please contact Jason or Tom or check the group email for his address. We have a very full agenda and every agenda item is connected to our mission to feed our hungry neighbors.
Next work day: Monday, 6PM. It should be nice weather. We will harvest, continue weeding, and prepare soil for cover crop planting.
Last Monday we had 9 volunteers who worked hard to harvest and weed. We are almost ready for our cover crop. Hopefully we can plant that cover crop after we have clear plan for 2023 after our meeting.
We had difficulties and successes this year:
Difficulties: Reduced squash production due to vine borers and limited space, limited corn and tomato production due to pests.
Successes: Record pepper production! First ever winter squash production at the Isidore and Maria garden. Record lettuce production.
My graph shows the pattern of the 2022 harvest compared to the 2021 harvest. The table on the left shows the total pounds harvested across the season.
I have not quite figured out the best way to show this data, but this gives a general picture of the pepper success this year compared to last year.
We just broke the 2021 pepper record and we still have some weeks left to harvest more peppers.
