Give and You Shall Receive - Sharing Gardens update

Co-founder Chris Burns pulls Jim Kitchen and a load of "prunings" to the burn-pile, demonstrating one of our founding principles, "If it ain't fun, why do it!".

Recently we've been blessed with amazing generosity from folks in our support circle. Jim and Cindy Kitchen donated a 2003 Town and Country mini-van which is an answer to a prayer as our 1968 GMC pick-up truck is really difficult to drive! Now Llyn has become the main driver and has driven more in the last month than the previous 10-years combined. This has been really a blessing to take the pressure off Chris to always be the driver.  Karen Josephson and Peter Stoel donated $2,000 for the third year in a row. Wow, that kind of generosity really lifts our spirits! This will be a huge help in keeping the program running. And Catherine Henry, in perusing our Wish List, found a home for a composting toilet she'd purchased but never got around to installing. Once we install it, this will allow us to host larger gatherings and summer-interns/guests without taxing our small indoor bathroom. Thank you so much!

Cindy Kitchen, thinning carrots. Cindy has an amazing capacity for doing the detail-work of gardening: things like picking beans, thinning root crops and weeding tiny seedlings. She's also great at the "big strokes" and can fill our giant garden-cart with weeds faster than anybody! The only problem is trying to get her to stop at the end of a session! We love our Cindy!

Our 2021 season is over (our 13th!). The only veggies left in the outdoor gardens and greenhouses are the cool-weather tolerant crops including lettuce, broccoli, beets, green onions, kale and chard. Our weather has been mild so far and if it continues to be so, these crops will continue to provide delicious and nutritious food for us and the few 'share-givers' (volunteers) who help us through the winter. 

The three months from August through October can feel overwhelming with the time-sensitive, competing demands of harvesting, watering, saving seeds and preserving food. We are relieved to have arrived at the time of the year when Chris and I can follow our own rhythms in tending to our home and the land. It's amazing to realize that everything will start up again in mid-January (albeit at a much slower pace!) with the first crops getting planted in our greenhouse beds. (These crops will include: onions, spinach, beets and carrots.)

We've tallied up our donations to charities and it's been another great year, 2,971 pounds! We keep precise records of our donations to charities by weighing everything before we send it. We derive our other totals through estimates though so you'll just have to take our word for it (though honestly, these numbers are probably low). Everything else: 4,280 pounds.

That makes our Grand total for 2021 somewhere in the ballpark of: 7,254 pounds!

For details of our harvest totals Click Here.

"Give and you shall receive." Though we view sharing as a reciprocal relationship (not just a one-way process where we give and others take), we recognize that not everyone has the same capacity to give. Some people aren't able to give at all due to poverty and physical challenges. We try to follow the practice: "From each according to their ability and to each according to their need." Through our project, no one has ever been denied access to our surplus just because they had nothing to give us directly. We also ascribe to the notion of "Paying it forward," trusting that generosity can have a rippling, multiplying effect as it moves through a community.

But for those who can give directly to our project, it comes in many forms: monetary donations, the donation of materials and through people's time. All of these gestures of support have helped us keep the program alive. 

In addition to the food we grow and share, the Sharing Gardens has become a hub of other forms of generosity. Because we have clean, delicious, abundant well-water we have folks who come weekly to fill water jugs. We have given away building materials, firewood, compost, garden tools, seeds and 'starts' and other materials we have had in surplus to those in need.

We also give freely of our knowledge through hands-on opportunities in our garden and through our website (which has received over 570,900 views in its lifetime - mostly for our 'How-To' posts).

What follows is a "Gallery of Givers"; a photo album of seasonal highlights and some of the people who have helped to make it happen, followed by a list of the many other donors who have blessed the project this year.

Meet our 'sharegivers': The people pictured below are the folks who come to the gardens throughout the growing season (and in some cases right through the winter). They give of their time and energies and share in the camaraderie of doing something meaningful together. They also receive a share in the harvests. We couldn't do it without them!

A gathering of many of our troupe: (back row) Llyn, Rook, Cindy, Jim, Chris (front row) Adri, Jazmin and Becky

Here's Sandra, the newest member of our crew - sorting lettuce for distribution.

A typical morning in early September. Here we are planting cabbage.

Rook, trimming garlic and preparing it to be "cured" for long-term storage.

Llyn and Kaylyn processing tomatoes and melons on harvest day.

Adri and Jazmin joined us in the summer months. Here they are picking scarlet runner beans.

Later in the summer they graduated from making concoctions with flower-heads, mud and weed-greens to crafting food that was actually quite delicious from real garden-ingredients. The lettuce wraps with tomato, fig and cucumbers were a favorite once the girls left out the raw garlic garnish!

Cindy tastes a sample of Jazmin's creations. Yumm!

That's Donn Dussell (who comes every Monday) and Chris in front of our newest greenhouse - the Phoenix, made mostly from recycled materials which they built together last winter. Donn will also be helping Chris put a new 'skin' on our larger, 20'x50' Ark greenhouse this winter.

Marilyn Dussell has a passion for running our riding mower! Thanks to her and Donn for their third year as CSA subscribers, volunteering in the gardens and all the other ways they show their support for our project.

Other contributors: In the second half of the year (since our last gratitude post published in June, 2021-LINK) and aside from the $2,000 donation from Karen and Peter mentioned above, we have received a total of $210 from Judy Peabody, Drake Wauters and Suzanne Campbell  - a local who has interest in partnering in wild-life habitat restoration projects.

Thanks to our CSA members:  Catherine Henry, Donn and Marilyn Dussell, Karen Josephson and Peter Stoel, Lilia Parker-Meyers, and Dian Wright. Amongst them, we fed at least 16 people as many of them fed not only themselves but friends and family as well.

Here is art work by Llyn's Mom Judy, showing our "Phoenix Farmhouse".

...and here's the farmhouse in the late Spring of 2021.

 Originally built in 1875 (the second oldest house still standing in Monroe), here is what the farmhouse looked like shortly after we began renovations in 2013. (LINK to photo gallery about Phoenix Farmhouse renovations.)

In October, Llyn's Mom and Uncle came for their annual visit and were super helpful. Thanks, Mom and Craig!

Judy, Llyn's Mom, harvesting tomatoes.

Craig, Llyn's uncle, sifting compost

Other donations: In response to our call for a laptop, many people responded. We kept one, donated by Thorin Nielson for Llyn to use for her writing projects and are passing along another one, donated by Donn and Marilyn Dussell to one of our steadfast volunteers, Rook.

Thorin, Eliza and Rook picking blackberries.

Catherine Henry, donor of the E-Loo composting toilet mentioned above has also donated several high-quality hoses, rain-bird sprinklers on stands, and other watering nozzles. 

Leaves and Grass and Compost, oh my!  This is the second year that the Sharing Gardens has grown all our food "veganically" and used zero amounts of commercial fertilizers, animal by-products or livestock manures. All our fertility comes from: leaves, grass-clippings, wood-ash and coffee grounds (see: Making Your Own "Veganic" Potting Soil in Your Greenhouse Paths - Using Worms). We are grateful to Jo and David Crosby (no, not the rock star!) who bring us many trailer-loads of leaves from their land each year. Also, our neighbors John and Donna Dillard and Irene and George Daugherty who have also delivered multiple loads of leaves. We also appreciate the city of Monroe (the small town where we live) for posting information about our leaf/grass drop-off site in our front yard for townspeople to bring us their yard waste. (For more info: Click Here - see pg. 4 of Nov. 2021 newsletter or Here for the SG post). 

 

 

Gratitude too to our dear friend John Kinsey who, in his quiet way has been supporting the gardens almost from the start. He lives a few blocks away, and retired in 2015 and, to keep himself from "going crazy with boredom," has been making us compost in his worm bins ever since. In the last two years he's easily brought us over 3-4 cubic yards of compost! He also goes to a local cafe  and picks up 15-25 gallons of coffee-grounds per week which contributes greatly to our garden's fertility. Thank you John!

Chris and John loading wood-chips in a wheel-barrow for distribution.

Here's a pic of about 3/4 of the firewood that was donated this year. Thanks to the Crosby's and the Ballards for donations of unsplit 'rounds' and to the Dussells for help with the splitting and use of their splitter. We are cozy and warm this winter, thanks to you!

Gratitude to our pollinators and wild pest-controllers: the birds, insects and other wild critters that call the Sharing Gardens "home". Here's the latest post about "Rewilding at the Sharing Gardens and good news about the West Coast Monarch species".

Jazmin, with a tree frog she caught in the gardens. At the beginning of the season she was afraid to pick them up and by the end, she and Adri were catching up to ten in a day and making little oasis/habitats for them before letting them go at the end of the morning.

and remember, as a wise Vulcan once said...