Kids day.....

The PING workshop today at Covenant Community Garden in Fuquay-Varina was all about the kids. They spent the morning harvesting, mulching beds, hauling coarse mulch for walkways, and preparing an old bed for a new crop. After a pot-luck lunch and an afternoon worship service, the younger kids went off for a reading of Stone Soup, and the older kids stayed with the adults who were taught about urban market gardening by young folks from SEEDS.

Chris Burtner, garden manager of Covenant Community Garden, and Slate Gray and Jeff Daniels.

Kane Martinez, Slate and Jeff harvesting carrots.

Michael Martinez - not at all camera shy!

Lisa Martinez, Jeff and Slate sorting out the bad from the good carrots.

Susan Greene (co-manager of Seagrove Community Garden) and Lisa working in the herb beds.Ricardo, Markyse and Anthony, youth from SEEDS in Durham, pointing out one of the features of the urban, market garden where they are employed. Here's a blurb about SEEDS from the Durham Farmer's Market web site.....
SEEDS Community Garden has been an oasis nestled between residential and industrial neighborhoods in Northeast Central Durham since 1994. The produce we bring to the Durham Farmers Market is raised by the Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG), a youth-led urban farming leadership development program that has been a part of SEEDS for the past 8 years. Our quarter-acre market garden is a former parking lot that is now a balanced ecosystem of plants and pollinators.
DIG empowers teens by teaching gardening, sound business practices, healthy food choices and food security values. The program emphasizes sustainable living and growing practices, ecological balance, and the natural recycling of organic materials for plant health and nourishment. DIG youth are paid a stipend to cultivate the fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers and mushrooms that they sell at the Durham Farmer's Market. We also sell our produce to LocoPops and the Durham Food Co-op.

The green invasion.....

Gardening is an experimental enterprise, a constant learning opportunity, with it's own learning curve. You can ask 25 gardeners the best way to grow tomatoes and receive 25 different answers. What works in one garden might not work in another. On top of all the things we can control, there are always things we cannot control. This spring has been ideal for a burgeoning garden, and a mix of experienced, novice, organic and non-organic gardeners. We have had plenty of timely rain, followed by plenty of warmth and sunshine. Consequently, our garden is becoming pretty lush, and our battle with weeds (green invasion) has become an ongoing process. We are having plenty of successes, and our failures have been minimal. We are also learning from our mistakes, growing as individuals, as a community, and as gardeners. To top it off - we get to eat better food simply because it wasn't imported 1,500 miles, it's pesticide and herbicide free, we are invested in it's production, and we're having fun while doing it.

Debbie Dowling after spending a considerable amount of time thinning out the Swiss chard.

Tim Greene pushing Slate Gray pushing the lawn mower.
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Several of us will be attending a PING workshop this Saturday in Covenant Community Garden at Fuquay-Varina UMC. The focus of this workshop is "kids and youth in the garden." Call Claire at (919) 542-1396 x 207 for more info, directions and to register.

Monday night in the garden.....

We accomplished much last night - Benjamin Burns brought his walk behind bush hog and cleaned up the area surrounding the garden, while his wife Bonnie, and her daughter Lisa and grandson Michael twined peas and mulched. Slate and Jeff arrived in time to haul mulch and covered up some beds as well.

Twining and mulching

Our first jalapeno.

A rare shot - Slate not talking and Lisa leaning. They must be tired.

The Romas are looking good.

Weeding, thinning, planning and first tomato.....

With all the rain we've had this past week, interspersed with plenty of sunshine, our garden is really taking off! So are the weeds. We spent some time in a planning session, trying to chart a more defined course for our next few workdays, and some time thinning out the carrots too. Even though our numbers were few, we got quite a bit accomplished. Hmmmmmhhh, chopping weeds while conversing with both new and old friends is a pretty good way to spend a Saturday morning. Oh yeah, the last image is of our first tomato. Yippee!

Garden images.....

The following are random images taken from our 3rd. workday, Saturday, April 19.

2nd. workday.....

Another three rows planted Saturday by faithful Seagrove Community Gardeners - Pat VonCannon, Donna Brown, Pat Callicutt, Venetia Smith, Tom Gray, Linda Bohn, Jim Bohn, Bobby Shelton, Tim, Susan and Jeffery Greene. We welcomed four new family members this week. Hooray!
Garden HQWe started the morning preparing beds by clod busting with rakes and hoes. This was the weekend for tomatoes and bush beans, squashes, melons and corn. One group planted row four with alternating 4’ squares of German Johnson (eating tomatoes) then a square of Heritage Bountiful bush beans, Roqq Paste (roma) tomatoes, more BB beans, cherry tomatoes, BB beans, Mt. Spring (supposed to be a good eating tomato!), BB beans, more German Johnsons, more BB beans. We plan on erecting a trellis system over the tomatoes to train them up and not out. A little later (warmer) we’ll companion plant plenty of basil in the tomato squares. Yum, fresh spaghetti sauce and pesto! Now if we could just find a local source for parmigiana reggiano…Row five got planted with alternating squares of Heritage green squash, more German Johnsons, Heritage golden hubbard squash, Botanical yellow crookneck squash, muskmelon (cantaloupe) and Heritage Star and Moon Watermelon.

Other members stayed busy repotting the Heritage Amish paste tomato and marigold seedlings that we started on April 5^th. Another week or two in their individual pots and they’ll be ready to go into the ground. Still other members grabbed various hacking and cutting tools and whacked away at the brush and vines that threaten to merge with our deer fence in the near future. Lastly we planted a final row of yellow sweet corn, next weekend we plan on planting more…is there such a thing as too much sweet corn?

We also made headway this week on our drip irrigation system, purchasing the majority of the hoses and parts that we need. We are SO thankful to the folks at Fiskar for giving us an $800 gift certificate to Home Depot as part of our winning grant; it is enabling us to make great strides converting our community garden vision into a very real entity. We are also grateful for Heifer International giving us such a wide variety of heritage seeds. It is immensely satisfying to be planting and raising vegetables that come with their own unique and individual histories and stories…just like our families.

Oh, and Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon God showered us with rain once again with perfectly divine timing. We are so very blessed!

First planting day.....

Saturday morning 4/12 started off cloudy & warm, not hot - perfect for sowing seeds and planting seedlings, onions and potatoes. Fifteen eager community gardeners clad in orange Fiskar's Project Orange Thumb tee shirts gathered around, ready to dive in to the tasks at hand at the first “official” workday of the Seagrove Community Garden. We all posed for commemorative group photos with our clean shirts and tools - all shiny and new! After the pictures we formed a circle and held hands as the Rev. Bob Dowling led us in a prayer and blessing. We went around the circle and introduced ourselves. Susan gave a brief introduction to the group of our organic gardening methods and the square-foot garden idea, demonstrating visually with a square foot grid made from wood strips. She explained the intensive planting design that discourages weed growth and promotes plant health through diversity and companion planting that discourages pests.

The first task at hand was to grab a rake or hoe and break up some of the larger dirt clods in the three beds we planned on sowing. The gardeners broke into smaller groups to accomplish a number of goals. In the next few hours, we planted 8 - 4’ beds of Kennebec, Cobbler and Yukon potatoes that should be ready to harvest mid-July. 128 lettuce seedlings and 144 spinach seedlings were transplanted to begin our salad days. One flat of marigolds was evenly distributed among the 3 rows. We planted a bed of beets, a bed of carrots and lots of radishes. We hope to get at least one picking from 4 - 20’ rows of sugar snap peas by mid-June and we put in over 300 each of yellow and white onions. We should have our first salads in about 7 weeks! Several members took on the job of planting new seed trays for successive planting and seeded 5 trays of nasturtiums, marigolds and romaine lettuce.Three hours later we began to call it a day as we finished filling the majority of the intended three 50’ x 4’ rows. Hot, dirty and tired but full of satisfaction from a job well done we parted ways after high fives, hugs and a sense of camaraderie. As soon as we left, God in his infinite wisdom gifted us with a perfect shower of gentle rain.