Big Turnout on First Workday
Saturday, April 14th
I hardly know where to begin with this post. We had a big turnout, and we accomplished
much more than I ever thought we would on our first official workday last
Saturday. About 9:30 a.m. everyone
started arriving with rakes and shovels in-hand; all kinds of hats and
sunglasses and tubes of sun block, ready to start working. I didn’t take an official count, but there
were well over 20 people there (including the kids). It was a beautiful day, and so the raking
began.
We had so much work to do, just managing rocks and clumps of
dirt and shaping our rows, I never believed we would get far enough to put the
first plant in the ground—but we did! In
fact, we planted all 40 tomato plants, all 25 cucumber plants and all 25 sweet
pepper plants. We even sowed 3 or 4 rows
with buckwheat (a natural soil amenity) to prepare them for a second crop of
tomatoes in July/August. By the end of
the day, almost all rows were shaped and ready for planting or at least ready
for adding compost. There are only a
couple more rows left to make next Saturday, and one or two that need to be
finished. It actually looks like a
garden now!
We found out that Paula Staudt is a Master Gardner, so we
put her and Jim on the planting detail.
She knew just how deep to plant, how far apart they should be, and how
to keep the rows straight as a string.
It’s a much prettier garden when everything is straight and symmetrical.
Jim Cowick kept the compost coming, and he stayed just ahead
of Paula and Jim with a steady supply, ready for them to blend it in with the
dirt and do their planting.
Our dirt has so many rocks in it that we solicited Alicia and
her helpers, Carol Cowick and Lizzie and Ellie Adelman to collect them and to create a
border for a bee-attracting flower bed.
A little dirt added to the area, and soon we will have some colorful
flowers in one corner of our beautiful garden.
All the kids were amazing! Covert
hung in there raking rows and aligning them with his Dad. Kali and Emma worked wherever they were
needed, and Michael took charge of the wheelbarrow.
Jerry Whitt raked and raked. There were so many rocks at the
entrance to the garden, and he made countless trips to dispose of them down in
the woods. I lost count of how many boxes
he toted down there after about a dozen or so.
On Friday morning Joe Sing, our part time gardener from Hyaets
came to till the dirt for us, and he did a great job. Even after having already been plowed once and
tilled twice, the dirt was still very hard-packed. He got over half of the garden done before
Robert Suydam came in and picked up where he left off. It was
tilled a total of four times. Late in
the afternoon on Friday, just as Robert was tilling the next-to-last row, the
tiller hit a big rock or maybe it was an old concrete foundation. It was something very big and very immovable. One tine broke off the rented tiller, and
another was bent badly enough that it hit against the tiller housing every time
it rotated. Well, the damage was so bad
that the job couldn’t be finished. We
returned a broken tiller to Home Depot Tool Rental. Fortunately, our rental contract contained
insurance just for such an eventuality, and we didn’t have to pay any extra for
the damage.
Our gardeners worked so hard, and everyone deserves a lot of
gratitude. I’m afraid I’ll leave someone
out, if I try to mention everyone. I
know there were some sore backs in church on Sunday morning. But you should have seen the smiles on
everyone’s faces when they left the garden on Saturday afternoon. There was even some attaboys (and girls) shoulder-patting
that went around...and around…and around.
We have some hard-working garden subscribers at SPCC.
Thanks for coming out and making it all happen,
everyone. It looks like we’re going to
have a terrific friendship garden.
I’d like to mention too, that we have some very accomplished
and experienced gardeners at SPCC who are not members of our group. They have been very helpful and have made
themselves available with answers and advice whenever it was asked for. Thanks Henry Graham and BJ Simmons.
Lost and
Found:
- A soft brown
sweater
- A nice stainless steel coffee cup
...were left at the garden on
Saturday.
They are inside our garden shed
waiting to be reclaimed.
Schedule
for Saturday, April 21st:
Two more
rows to be raked up
Compost
added to the mix
Planting
about 60 more tomato plants
Sowing Swiss
chard seeds
Sowing squash
seeds
Sowing green
beans and finishing up the pole framework
And…of
course watering new seeds and plants
Pinning the
bottom of the fence fabric to the ground
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