Spring has sprung! Sharing Gardens update

Hello friends and family of the Sharing Gardens - though we've had two brief snow storms since our last update, each accumulating about 2" of the white stuff, spring is definitely in the air! Temperatures are consistently reaching the low-to mid-50's in the day and rarely dipping much below freezing at night. Soon we'll turn the water back on to the garden spigots and give our two main greenhouses a thorough soaking, including the paths, and begin the cycle again of generating compost right in our paths! (LINK-How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening)

Before we give you our latest garden-related links, you might enjoy watching this short video of a joyous, sweet song performed by the Masaka Kids Afrikana - I Look to You-LINK. Guaranteed to make you smile!

Early spring snow, soaking the ground.

In our planting zone (Willamette Valley, Oregon, USDA zone 7b), early March is a time of completing the pruning of fruit and nut trees and the pruning and care of other perennials (before warmer temps cause the sap to begin to rise). We continue to start seedlings both on heat-mats, and directly in the raised-beds in our greenhouses.

Though this picture was taken in 2022, it shows our 48 grape vines after pruning. LINK - Great video on Pruning Table Grapes.

Here are our most recent garden-related posts:

Growing your own celery is not difficult, it just takes a lot of time to get the celery plants started! (Their roots are very slow to develop). But once they do you can have cut-and-come-again celery that extends through the main growing season, and in a greenhouse, right through to mid-winter! LINK

Growing Lettuce from seed (with general tips about starting seedlings at home).

Great news for the Monarch butterflies in southern California! After a nerve-wrackingly low winter count of nesting Monarchs in 2021 (only 2,000), they seem to be bouncing back! (250,000 in 2022 and 335,479 in 2023). Even if you live too far north to help the Monarchs (there are no consistent sightings north of Portland Oregon), planting milkweed will still benefit other pollinators. They are gorgeous, stately plants and smell divine! Here's how to grow milkweeds: LINK.

Adri and Kaylynn holding up Showy Milkweed seedlings they helped grow.

In our last newsletter, we included a link to a video about a small town in NZ that came together during the lock-downs to collectively make sure all its members stayed fed with healthy food by, among other things, working as volunteers to create and maintain garden-plots for single-parent/low-income families. Any food that the families couldn't eat themselves was harvested and prepared into healthy meals at a small cafe/community-center. This hub of community also became the site for craft-projects and the sharing of practical life-skills such as sewing and simple carpentry to create useful products sold to raise money for the project to continue. 

We've received numerous appreciative comments for sharing the link. So, in case you missed the LINK in our last newsletter, here it is again.

And, in case this newsletter was forwarded by a friend, or you've just stumbled on our website for the first time and you would like to be added to our list to receive future newsletters, send us an email at the Sharing Gardens: shareinjoy AT gmail.com "Bee" well!  Chris and Llyn

Starting Tomatoes from Seed

Transplanting tomato starts (tofu containers with holes drilled in bottom re-purposed for seed-starting).

Here in the Pacific NW, it's time to start tomatoes from seed. Most varieties need 6-8 weeks to grow large enough and sturdy enough to be transplanted into garden beds. Since our last risk of frost is around mid-May, early to mid March is the time to start the seeds. And, if you're like us and grow most/all of our tomatoes in greenhouses, they can be transplanted from their pots even sooner.

 

Tomatoes are warmth-loving plants needing to germinate at around 70-75 degrees so they need to be started indoors to thrive. We germinate ours on a heat-mat specifically designed for this purpose. Once the seeds are up, they need full sun to keep from getting pale and leggy. A greenhouse is best, as long as you don't get freezing temps or have a heat source on cold nights. If you don't have a greenhouse, a grow-light will work, or a south-facing window. Keep rotating plants so they grow straight up (not towards the window).

Grapes, Onions and Peas, oh my!

 Light is returning! Slowly, slowly, the days are getting longer, smells of spring are in the air and the garden tasks shift from winter's rest to a quickening into pruning and mulching our orchards, managing our willow patch and starting seeds for another season of flowers for the pollinators and bounteous veggie harvests. 

Here are links to seasonally relevant posts:

Valentines Day - Time for Pea Planting!  

Here are two posts about starting onions from seed:

Using heat mats and shallow pots  and in deep pots without a heat mat.

And here's the best video tutorial we've found on Pruning Table Grapes

 

Finally, a photo gallery of current garden projects:

We've spent the winter in preparing greenhouse raised beds for planting...

Donn and Chris mix compost, ashes and coffee grounds into our raised beds; ready for spring planting.

 and deep-cleaning and organizing our garden-sheds...

"A place for everything, and everything in its place...". Here are tomato stakes and sawhorses just waiting to be put back into service.

Our neighbors have brought us their extra leaves which we will use for mulch and to create next year's soil...

This is about 1/3 of the leaves we've had donated this year. Thank you to the Crosby's and the Dillards who send their leaf-bounty to us each year, and to Chuey (their landscape guy) for collecting all those leaves and bringing them to us!

Many neighbors bring us their leaves in plastic bags which we hang to dry and bundle in rolls of 5 or 6 bags. These are offered back to our neighbors for free, for re-use.

Now, we're shifting our focus to pruning and mulching our perennial and orchard plants:

Our willow hedge is in serious need of pruning! This picture was taken in 2021 and many of the shoots that weren't removed then have doubled in diameter!

We use the smaller willow shoots in building this living-willow-wattle fence. Every year, we have enough smaller willow to raise this fence up another foot or so.

Now's the time to mulch all our hazelnut and fruit trees. Our wood chip pile is almost all gone.

A high-school intern and Stefani loading wood chips for distribution.

The mulch helps keep moisture in the ground, blocks weeds and protects the trees from the mower getting too close. It also provides a slow-release fertilizer as it breaks down.

Seed-starting has begun: Lettuce, onions, peas, Fava beans, carrots, beets, cabbage and kale!

Chris continues to start seedlings directly in our greenhouse raised beds...

He's also begun direct-seeding beets, carrots and spinach in the greenhouses. Here he is putting a black lawn/leaf bag over the newly seeded carrot bed. The plastic keeps the bed from drying out too fast and its dark color heats the soil below when the sun shines on it, hastening germination.

Llyn has been starting perennial, native flower seeds. Many seeds of this type need a cold-spell to break dormancy, and an extended time to germinate (10-12 weeks). Here's an excellent article on Autumn and Winter Seed Sowing in Six Easy Steps from the Wild Seed Project.

 It won't be long before we are starting our heat-loving seeds and before you know it our greenhouses will be filled with delicious, nutritious food!

Our 'Ark' greenhouse, May 24, 2022. Yum!

Kale joins the "Dirty-Dozen' list: and How to Grow Your Own Kale

Kale - a generous plant!

Every year, the Environmental Working Group publishes the findings of their analysis of concentrations of farm-chemicals in popular produce. This CNN article goes into more detail about this year's study. Unfortunately, kale and collards - two of the most nutrient-dense foods available, have made it onto the list again.

 

Below is a  a re-post of an article we published back in 2019 with other useful links on the topic of farm chemicals in food and some tips on growing your own garden-greens. If you're local and have some garden-space to add some kale, chard or collards, let us know soon so we can start some "starts" for you.

The re-post:

In recent weeks (April 2019) we've seen several headlines announcing that kale has made it onto the "Dirty Dozen" list for the first time in ten years.  The "Dirty Dozen" list is compiled each year by testing thousands of samples of fruits and vegetables from different sources to see which have highest concentrations of herbicides and pesticides LINK. And the farm chemicals are not just showing up on the vegetables themselves, studies have shown that, people being tested have increasingly been found to have these chemicals show up in fluid samples such as blood and urine (see links below). 

 

It is unfortunate that kale has returned to the "Dirty Dozen" list as, in the past few years, it has shown a surge in popularity. Its recent following is not surprising as it tastes similar to broccoli and it is at the top of another list - The Aggregate Nutrient Density Index (ANDI), that rates foods by their nutrient density. Kale (and collards) have the densest concentration of nutrients, per calorie, of a wide range of foods tested. (PDF of 72 tested foods) (explanation of chart). On the positive side of things, people who have switched to an all-organic diet have been able to reduce these chemical residues by as much as 90% in as little as two weeks (see links below).

Kale is the most nutrient-dense plant tested! (PDF of 72 tested foods)(explanation of chart)

So, if you'd like to incorporate more organically grown kale into your diet  and you're on a budget (we've noticed that prices for organic kale have really risen in the past few years...) perhaps you'd like to try and grow your own!

Kale is very easy to grow! Here's our POST on growing kale.

Grow your own kale: Kale is super-easy to grow and 2-4 plants will easily keep a family fed over the course of the summer. If your climate isn't too harsh you can grow a second crop that will produce food through the fall and winter too (though at a much slower rate). Here's our POST on growing kale.

Home grown veggies, freshest and best!

How we grow our food at the Sharing Gardens: Because we are not a commercial farm, all our labor is provided by volunteers and we are under no pressure to produce food on a forced timeline to get it to market ahead of the other farmers in our area, our food is slow-grown, with less water-weight and hence more nutrient-dense. We fertilize primarily with compost derived from leaves, grass, weeds and food scraps, wood-ash from our wood-burning stove and with worm castings we harvest from the paths of our greenhouses LINK. We do not use commercial fertilizers. The wood-ash and the composted tree-leaves both provide re-mineralization of our soils because the tree-roots pull up minerals from deep within the soil. Without forcing our plants to grow fast with high-nitrogen fertilizers, or animal manures, they are more resistant to diseases and insect infestations that are caused, in part, by the thinner cell-walls of plants forced to grow unnaturally quickly.

Sign posted at the Food Pantry to encourage more kale-eating.

Related links:

Dr Aviva's Simple and Savory Tuscan Kale Salad

 
Kale rejoins the list of Dirty-Dozen list as one of the most contaminated with pesticides:

Not-So-Superfood! Pesticide residue found in 70% of U.S. produce & 92% of kale

What the pesticides in our urine tell us about organic food - The Guardian

Organic diet intervention significantly reduces urinary pesticide levels in U.S. children and adults - Science Direct 

Researchers reveal organic diet can remove pesticides residue in the body by 60% in just one week!

 

Sharing Gardens: Why we grow and eat organic food.

Now, doesn't that look yummy!

A Wintery Summary - News from the Gardens Jan. 2023

Howdy Folks - Well the 2022 garden season has finally come to an end. Actually, it never really ends but the autumn clean-up, seed-saving, food preservation and the harvesting of all the compost we've generated in our greenhouse paths are done.

This post has some reflections on the 2022 season as well as a look forward into how things are changing at the Sharing Gardens.

Our house, workshop, Oz-greenhouse and garden shed - 2022.

One big change was that we dropped the CSA (weekly boxes of fresh-farm produce provided on a subscription basis) which meant we had a rebound in the amount of surplus fruits and vegetables we were producing. At the same time, our volunteer crew  was the largest and most committed group of share-givers ever. Some weeks we had 10 helpers (besides me and Chris) spread over the week. Since all share-givers receive as much produce as they can use in a given week and this year we also converted about 20% of garden space that had been used to grow annual crops into orchard (due to an invasion of bindweed) the garden's surplus was probably the lowest since 2018 as well.

Fortunately these factors which reduced the surplus we had to share coincided with a reduction in need by the main Food Pantry we have served with our donations over the years: South Benton Food Pantry. This is due to a variety of reasons. (other farmers/gardeners donating their surplus; other 'sharing'-type gardens making donations (SAGE Garden, Corvallis); the food warehouse that serves our local food banks contracting with farmers to grow food for distribution and, in one case, a Food Pantry partnering with a Gleaners group to collect surplus produce from the Corvallis Farmer's Market and First Alternative Food Co-op).

Though we took a year off from weighing our donations, we estimate that the SBFP still received at least 500 pounds of produce. We also donated almost a thousand pounds of produce to Stone Soup Kitchen who prepares hundreds of meals/week to share free-of-charge to people in need. Though it was sometimes a challenge to find a way to deliver our donations (a half-hour from the Gardens) we always felt good about our contributions, knowing our produce was being made into delicious meals. (See: Generosity of the Stone Soup Kitchen) But honestly, there were times at the peak of summer harvests that even the Stone Soup folks were overwhelmed with donations!

When we began the Sharing Gardens in 2009 we had one main purpose: Our mission was to encourage mutual generosity by growing food as a community (no separate plots) and sharing the harvest with those who had contributed in some way while having enough surplus to donate to local food charities. At that time the main fresh fruits and vegetables most Food Pantries received were the cast-offs that groceries couldn't sell. There were hardly any gardeners growing extra veggies to share, or they didn't know where to bring their surplus. This has changed dramatically in the 14 years since we started.

Chris and Llyn: Sharing Gardens founders at original site - 2009

Llyn with first donation: July 8, 2009

We are very happy to see that times have changed and fresh food, much of which has been grown organically, is available now to food-charity recipients. On the other hand, it has caused us to ask ourselves, "Have we fulfilled the mission we set out for ourselves," and if so, "what is our role now"?

This is part of the produce selection we donated one week to the S. Benton Food Pantry in 2017. We were still the primary donors at that time. Now, at the peak of the harvest season, the pantry has four tables of donated/procured produce each week! Some weeks we can't find room for our donations (wow!).

 

We have already begun to expand to provide services to a wider circle of neighbors through our leaf and grass drop-off site and wood chip pick-up sites. Here are some posts about these projects:

How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening: includes info on our successful leaf and lawn-clipping drop off site. (Cindy, rt. spreading donated leaves around the artichoke plants.)

Free woodchips for our town! - a new development this year that provides a mutual benefit to our neighbors as well as the tree trimming companies that use our site.

Moving forward, the gardens are still going strong. We'll continue to grow all the usual favorites (tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, beets etc) to share with our share-givers to keep them fed and healthy, and there will still always be some surplus of these annual veggies and fruits to pass along to charities. 

In addition though, we're shifting some of the emphasis of garden-plantings more towards winter-storage foods. Here's a post about these shifts:

"Squashes and grains and beans, oh my!" -  a shifting focus on what foods we grow... (Jenny, rt. harvesting sorghum).

The next few months we'll focus on pruning our orchards, weeding and mulching perennial beds and continuing to prep the raised beds in our greenhouses in anticipation of planting the early spring crops.

We also have some other ideas of how the Sharing Gardens may expand into a more comprehensive, "full circle" project in the months and years ahead. With environmental and economic issues so pressing, the need for models of locally based community-building processes that meet real needs (fuel, shelter, food etc) for humans, and habitat restoration for wildlife, seem more relevant than ever! 

We are curious to see what's next. Along with our continuance with the gardens, and the wood-chip/leaf and grass-clipping sites mentioned above, here are some possibilities we are exploring: firewood gleaning team, tool sharing co-op, construction-material salvaging parties and/or conservation "guilds" to spend time on each other's land cultivating wildlife habitat.  

Let us know if you'd like to be involved! 

 

How to Harvest and Process Dried beans

Jim and Cindy with Kidney beans.

It's possible to grow enough beans to dry and store for one's winter use. It helps to grow food in the Sharing Gardens model though, so you have plenty of help with the processing. We've been able to grow enough Scarlet Runner beans and Kidney beans over the last several years (since 2019) to supply all the beans that the two of us need for a year (Llyn and Chris) and have enough to share with the people who help with the gardens.

Here's the process we use for processing Scarlet Runner Beans:

To grow beans for winter storage or to save seed for future plantings they should be left on the vines to ripen as long as possible. Don't pick the pods until they are evenly tan and dry. If picked too green, beans won't be viable as seeds and they won't store well.  They won't ripen more after  you pick them and so pick only the ripest, fullest bean-pods. Bean pods should be brown and mostly dry to the touch.  

 

Once the frost hits, beans won't ripen any more. If there are any ripe pods left, we pull them off the vines and continue to dry them in baskets above our wood-stove till the shells are crisply dry. This prevents them from molding while in storage and, the drier the pod, the easier it is to shell. If there are any beans that you're not sure if they are fully ripe, use them first as they won't store as well as fully cured beans. Discard any beans that are obviously unripe.

 

Here, Adri and Grandpa Jim shell scarlet runner beans. If you are saving dry beans (for winter storage or seed) leave them on the vine till their shells turn tan and dry. This assures the beans are fully ripe and will make shelling easier.