Hi Folks! On April 15th, 2009, our friend Steve Rose broke ground with his tractor at Alpine Park, marking the birth of the Sharing Gardens. We're nine years old this week!
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| Here's Chris, forming 'raised beds' with our little 1947 Farmall Cub tractor in Alpine, after Steve Rose had plowed it (April, 2009). |
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| Here's Llyn with the Sharing Gardens' first harvest taken to the Food Pantry, July 2009. |
Here are a few highlights from the 2018 season so far. Enjoy!
We've had two service-learning groups from Oregon State University. We have two more scheduled for later this spring.
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| The February group helped us mulch trees... |
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| ...empty our compost bins... |
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| ...mulch our blueberries... |
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| ...and mix and sift soil in preparation for starting seedlings. |
Our second group of OSU students came on April 14th. The ground was too wet to do anything outside so they helped us in the greenhouses:
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| April, Ema and Anna harvest radishes. |
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| They helped us transplant tomatoes too. |
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| Here's Cody harvesting lettuce in the Sun Ship greenhouse... |
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| ...and potting onions to be transplanted outdoors once the ground dries out. |
We've managed to host a few volunteer sessions with our local Share-givers:
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| Chris and Rook mulching potatoes with leaves in the Sun Ship greenhouse (Feb 15). |
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| Rook, Kat and Llyn planting cabbage before the big rains came (March 20). |
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| Here's Kat on April 5th. Even on cool, wet days outside, it's always more pleasant in the greenhouses! |
We are so grateful for our two big greenhouses. They allow us to plant many cold-weather crops directly in the ground much earlier than we could outside. Also we can start all the heat-loving seedlings and grow them big indoors so they're ready for outside planting as soon as the last likely frost-date has passed.
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| Here's a view of the Ark greenhouse on March 15. |
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| Here's that same view in mid-April. Left bed has radishes, and two
patches of lettuce. Right bed has radishes, beets and red lettuce in the
background. Note fresh grass-clippings in the path. These are very
pleasant to walk and kneel on, smell great, and provide food for the
worms and other "micro-livestock" living below. |
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| I didn't take many early pics of the Sun Ship greenhouse for comparison, but here's Chris, on April 18th examining our pea-patch, started in mid-December! It looks like we're going to have a fantastic harvest this year. |
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| We experimented with starting tomatoes and peppers in early/mid February
on heat mats with excellent results (late Feb. start is more typical for our region). We had only a few freezing nights once they had sprouted, but
the seedlings did fine under plastic tray covers and/or 'floating row cover fabric' with the heat mats left on. |
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| Here are some of those same tomato 'starts' on April 17. Some are beginning to flower already! |
As some of you recall, we had a terrible problem last year when
our potting soil was contaminated with herbicides (from un-composted horse manure) which killed many of our tomato-, pepper -, and flower-seedlings. No sign of that problem this year; all our seedlings look great!
Great, spring weather is in the forecast and we expect everything will really begin to grow much faster now. Hurray!
