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| Lettuce and kale at harvest time |
We have exciting news! Chris and I are just days away from finishing
our new greenhouse at the Monroe site. It's a moderate size, 12' x 40'
but plenty big to grow enough starts for the garden and to share with
others in need. It's our own design, made with bamboo held together by
PVC fittings and a plywood skirting around the bottom. We've screwed it
all together so, if we ever need to move it, it will come apart easily.
We'd
love to show you a picture of it but that brings us to another
topic...Our camera no longer "talks" to our computer. It still takes
pictures and stores them on its memory chip but we can no longer upload
them. Help! Does anyone have a digital camera they're no longer using,
that they'd like to donate to the project?
Other news:
Saturday, March 31 - 9:00 to 2:00 is the
springtime Giveaway at
the Legion Hall in Monroe, organized by Christy Warden and her "Crafty
Critters" 4-H group. This bi-annual event gives us all a chance to clean
out our closets and pantries and make way for the new. You may make
donations on Friday, March 30th between 10 and 2 at the Legion Hall in
Monroe. Please bring: clothes, housewares, non-perishable foods and
whatever else you are ready to let go of. The Sharing Gardens will have
broccoli, cabbage, peas and sunflower starts to give away. The event is
open to everyone, regardless of your income level. Leftovers will go to
other charity groups (decided by the 4-H members).
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| 4-H Giveaway - 2011 |
Wednesday, April 25 - 5:00 to 8:00 pm, Sharing Gardens is participating in
the Health Fair
at the Monroe High School. There are many other groups participating,
offering free blood-pressure and other health checks and information on
living a healthier lifestyle. We'll be demonstrating a simple and
delicious way to
grow your own winter-greens: sunflower sprouts.
Farm to Farm Century Ride: Last
September, this 100-mile cycle event -- touring local farms -- was such
a fun and successful way to raise money for the gardens (the organizers
donated $2,000 to our project) that we're going to do it all over
again. Save the date:
Sept. 15, 2012. There will be a fifty-mile version, and a 100-mile version. We'll be looking for volunteers to join in the fun.
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| Volunteers at harvest time |
Volunteering: We're starting to get inquiries
from people who want to help out in the gardens. Here's how this works.
During the spring months, we have to work with the challenges of the
weather and the wetness of the land. It's difficult to establish
consistent volunteer times. By June, things will start to fall into a
rhythm and we will have regular times we'll be gathering in the garden
to plant, weed, mulch and harvest. If you'd like to be informed of times
you can help out in the greenhouse, or gardens; learn about growing
food organically, and share in the harvest (and you're not already on
our list) just send us an email to
shareinjoy@gmail.com.
Gratitude: We have a big thank you to extend to
Larry Winiarski.
Not only did he hire us to help him set up his greenhouse for maximal
functionality but he let us start a bunch of seeds while we speedily
finished up our own new greenhouse in Monroe. If it weren't for Larry we
wouldn't have been able to get broccoli, kale, cabbage, lettuce or
spinach started in time.
John Kinsey has also been a huge help.
He's started peas and onions in his own greenhouse, donated a
considerable amount of salvaged lumber for use in building the
greenhouse, and also helped us spread donated leaves in the gardens for
mulch. We'll be doing a whole post on John at some point. He's developed
quite an amazing set-up for growing red-wiggler (composting) worms and
he's provided the gardens with dozens of bags of their pure castings for
us to amend our soil and grow starts in.
John Sundquist generously
opened up his River's Bend Farm and let us harvest all the bamboo we
needed to build the greenhouse (and more!). We also wish to thank the
others in the community
who have hired us to do pruning and other yard-work jobs. The income
from this work is what is allowing us to keep doing the gardens as we
are financing the project primarily out of our own savings at this
point.
Thank you all.
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| Barbara Standley donating nursery flats |
Wish List:
- A digital camera: preferably 8.3 mega-pixels (or better) as lower-resolution pictures don't work as well for our blogs.
- Save those six-packs! If you buy starts commercially, save
the six-packs and other pots they come in. We can use all sizes. We
prefer square containers that fit into trays but bring us what you've
got and we'll find homes for what we can't use.
- Utility trailers: We've been talking to the landscaper at the
grade school and, if we have a trailer that he can dump the grass
clippings onto, it will be an easy matter to haul them to the gardens
and use for mulch, or in our compost piles. We haven't talked to the
high school landscapers but we suspect they'd be willing to work with us
too.
- Plastic tubs, 5-gallon buckets, kitty-litter tubs etc. (please no broken ones)
- T-posts (slightly bent, OK). All lengths helpful.
- Metal pipes: (like from a well) - we can cut them to size and build trellises from them.
- Cedar fence boards - we use them to build bird houses and compost bins (among other things).
- Cash donations always appreciated.
