Gallery of Givers: Highlights from the 2023 Season

This has been a wonderful year at the Sharing Gardens; much bounty, new friendships. Our experiments with Local, Plant-sourced Fertility (LINK: How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening) continue to yield massive quantities of highest quality soil/compost. Both our seed collection and our wildlife habitat grows with each year. Our lives, (me and Chris) are centered on this land, this project, this lifestyle. We are so fortunate to be able to to give all our focus to our life here at the Sharing Gardens.

And yet, we couldn't have done it without the dedicated help of our wonderful share-givers. Here is a gallery of some of the year's highlights. (That's Joey - above, sifting compost scooped out of our greenhouse paths. Joey joined our crew this summer. He's been such an amazing contribution to the program. He's strong and generous of spirit and always willing to do whatever needs to get done.)

Share-givers typically come once a week for about three hours but we had two gung-ho helpers who managed to come twice a week for much of the summer, Joey and Maddie. Here they are harvesting elephant garlic in June. (Maddie had to go back to school this fall. We miss you Maddie, but we hope you'll come play in the Gardens again next summer and bring some of your young, strong, healthy friends!)

Sometimes we work in small groups:

Chris, Joey and Jim digging potatoes.

Another group potato-dig. This was our best year yet. We harvested just over 400 pounds!

Joey and Donn sift the compost we scoop out of our greenhouse paths. Chris here is bagging it in repurposed bags from pellet-stove fuel. In 2023, we estimate that we harvested about 200 bags of this 'black gold"! This becomes the foundation of our potting mix (which we haven't bought in several years) and is alsso used as a soil amendment in all our garden beds.

Suzanne, Darlene and Chris sifting compost. It's full of worm eggs which then hatch over the course of the winter while still in the bags, or in the garden beds next spring.

Venecia and Michael from OSU's Service Learning program, help Chris gather apples in the midst of a downpour. The light was incredible that day; golden-peachy, coming through the clouds, rain in showers and everything washed clean and bright - including the air. It was a great fruit year this past summer! This is the first year these trees, planted in 2013, yielded significant fruit. And boy did they!

In these next two pics, OSU students from a Sustainability class performed service learning at the Sharing Gardens and received college credit for their efforts.

One of the tasks they performed was to load leaves onto tarps and distribute them in the beds we eventually grew winter squash in. We are especially grateful to the Dillards and Crosby's - two neighborhood households who donate the vast majority of their leaves to our project. They bring them by the trailer-load!

Sometimes it's great just to be in pairs...

Darlene and Sandra - fun in the potato patch!

Suzanne and Darlene cutting up apples for applesauce. Our fruit trees were amazingly productive (as were most trees in the southern Willamette valley of western Oregon where we live.). We canned 49 quarts of applesauce. Lots for us and lots to share!

More autumn tasks...Jim is teasing the sorghum seed-heads off their stalks (Grow Your Own Sorghum for Grain and Flour). Chris is shelling dried beans (we grew over 50 pounds of dried beans in 2023!) Chris and I held back this year's harvest for our own use and distributed all that was left over from last year amongst our sharegivers. (Grow Your Own Protein: Scarlet Runner beans).

Snacking in the celery patch! Chris and Donn with a big harvest on its way to the food pantry.

And here are a few wonderful solo pics:

Here I am, Llyn, with a bouquet of broccoli comprised of three heads bunched together. Our spring broccoli didn't perform very well but this fall crop grew with great vigor and vitality! There's just no comparison between store-bought and home-grown, fresh broccoli. So sweet and tender!

Jim loves to mow - and we are SO grateful!

Cindy, with her many years experience, is a fast and thorough harvester. Here she is with most of our white onion harvest.

Suzanne, threshing sorghum.

Rook has been a champion sorghum harvester. Here he is with a variety called Ba Ye Qi which has a short season so it works well in northern climates. He's dealing with some severe health problems this year so missed much of the summer/fall season. We're holding him in our thoughts and prayers that he'll be able to rejoin us in the spring.

Llyn with part of a day's harvest in the autumn. It's often difficult to find room on all the tables and benches to put everything! Food is distributed first to our sharegivers (including other supporters of the garden such as our neighbors' landscaper, Chuy who brings over all their surplus grass-clippings and leaves) and the copious surplus is donated to food charities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and our beloved Cindy who, like the best Grandma, bakes cookies and pies to share with us at snack time in the Gardens (and sometimes she'll make something just for me and Chris!).

We always love having family and past participants come join us for garden fun...

Llyn's uncle Craig always jumps right in to help whenever he comes to visit. Here he is sifting compost.

We had wonderful visits from Cindy's (left) granddaughter Adri (middle) this summer. Adri's 12 now and has been coming to the gardens since a few months after she was born. She's moved to Tennessee now but on her visit she was a great help in the Gardens. That's Judy on the right; Llyn's Mom. We can't thank her enough for her profound support over the years. Our "greatest fan"! And super-helpful too! In this picture we were telling childhood stories at snack time and having a great laugh!

Here's another one of Judy/Mom teasing baby lettuce plants apart for transplanting into the beds. Thanks for everything, Mom!

And finally...We always try to make time for snacking in the Garden! Here's Chris and Joey enjoying our delicious home-grown apples. (Joey moved to Portland at the end of the season...We miss you Joey!).