Epworth Veggie Garden - Flowers

The flowers are adding some wonderful color to the veggie garden. In one of the raised beds, we have some purple iris with a border of brown and yellow pansies. If the veggie garden was just rows of green vegetables the garden would not be as inviting. A number of the neighbors surrounding the garden have donated plants. Later on this season, we will be planting other flowers including marigolds, more pansies, salvia and dusty miller. We also have a couple of roses that are beginning to bloom.



Check out a picture from our first year (4 years ago) - Not much color:

Epworth Veggie Garden - Strawberries

Here comes the strawberries! We have an variety of strawberries at the Epworth Veggie Garden that are "June-bearing" strawberries. Everyone seems to love when the strawberries begin to ripen and I'm sure we all sample one every now and then to make sure they are ok. We first planted strawberries about 3 years ago. They were a gift to our garden and they have continued to multiply and even grow out of the raised bed. Below you can see how the strawberries looked back at the first of April and how much they have grown since then.

Maple Grove UMC Garden

Work continues over at the Maple Grove UMC Garden. We're always battling the thistles that seem to almost pop up over night. Thistles have lots of roots so unless you continue to dig up as much of the root system as possilbe the battle will continue. We've got tomatoes green beans, broccoli, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers and lettuce planted.

More Work at Buckeye Lake

We had some help today as we worked to add some additional soil to the raised beds at Buckeye Lake. We hope to plant even more plants on Wednesday. Everyone pitched in and we got the additional soil in the raised beds and the trash cleaned up in no time. Right now we have plants in just a couple of the raised beds - some garlic, tomatoes and peppers. Things go much faster when there are a number of hands helping out.

Rain - Epworth

We've always had some issues at the Epworth Veggie Garden with the rain water draining properly. Last year and the beginning of this season we concentrated on amending the soil where we knew we has some drainage issues. Looks like we need to works some on the raised beds also. Here you can see how we have standing water in the raised bed with garlic. Not really a good plan to have water standing around your plants. We'll see about getting this situation fixed soon. I'm fairly sure garlic plants do not like "wet feet".

Harvesting at Epworth Veggie Garden

Finally, we have our first harvest of the year from Epworth Veggie Garden. We had hoped to have some lettuce a bit earlier in the season. It never fails when you make plans that things will change! We had announced that we would work in the garden this evening at 5PM, but of course we had the first rain we've seen in almost a week.


The garden was really muddy so we decided just to dart in the garden between showers and cut a little bit of lettuce. We could have cut a bunch more lettuce, but we will see how this batch of lettuce is distributed. We ended up with 7 - 1 gallon bags of "mixed lettuce". We have three different varieties in the mix. Red Sail, a type of Romaine and I'm not sure about the last type. Last year we had about 54 - 1 gallon bags of lettuce and we were not that focused on "production" at the time. This year we hope to have over 100 - 1 gallon bags of lettue to distribute at the food pantry at Epworth.

Buckeye Lake

Worked has picked up over at the Takin' it to the Edge Community Garden over at Water's Edge at Buckeye Lake. We've moved the garden to a little bit of a different spot to accommodate the new construction to add on to the building. We've decided to change the raised beds just a bit. We've got 9 - 3 ft. by 3 ft. beds. Still a lot of work to do, but we have at least started. Everyone is so proud of the new sign. We had a hard time working with some of the topsoil, compost and other soil materials. The soil was a bit wet out of the bag and of course all of the young kids couldn't wait to get their hands in the dirt.

Maple Grove Garden

Tonight at Maple Grove's garden we began planting. Some of the vegetables we planted included: tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, green beans and zucchini. I feel like we've gotten a bit of a late start, but I'm sure the veggies will catch up with a little sun and some water. Next week, I am sure we'll add a few more veggies to the garden. We've got straw left over from the garden last year that we are using as mulch on the tomatoes.

This evening, Jonathan from Rain Brothers brought over the rain barrel for the garden. We've got the rain barrel on a platform so we can connect a water hose and with a little gravity, water the garden. Rain water is great to use on the plants instead of the regular water from the city. We are glad to support Rain Brothers as they are not only a local business, but also involved with community gardening. We have 3 rain barrels over at Epworth Veggie Garden.

Epworth Veggie Garden - More Plants

We planted a few more things at the Epworth Veggie Garden this evening. Assorted lettuces went in the "asphalt garden". We've already planted some broccoli in the same garden. Planted some rosemary in the herb garden and also planted a couple of small rows of radishes - one variety all white (White Globe?)and one variety all red. We also dug up some thistles which were beginning to take over some spots. We dug them up with a shovel to get as much of the root out as possible. Penny then spent some time to till up some of the area, but did not have time to completely till everything that needed to be tilled. We still have a number of veggies to plant in the garden. Hopefully, we'll have some time to get more plants/seeds in the ground later on this week.

Maple Grove UMC

Work continued over at the Maple Grove UMC garden this evening. George added some compost to the main garden and tilled it in this evening. This will be the second year we've grown veggies at the Maple Grove Garden. You can really see the soil looking better the second year and with the compost added. There is also some straw from last year that got tilled in and some additional straw that was raked up and will be used as a mulch to conserve some water. Julie and Penny worked on removing lots of thistles from the two little bed right next to the garage. Thistle have always been a problem in the little raised beds. We just try to dig them up and get as much root out as possible. The crew decided to wait until next week to plant.

Broccoli - Epworth Veggie Garden

We're running a little bit behind with planting some of the cooler weather veggies, but tonight we planted approximately 30 broccoli plants at the Epworth Veggie Garden. We put some in one of the small raised bed - sq. ft gardening box. We planted the rest of the broccoli in the new asphalt/cement block garden we are building on part of the parking lot. We've grown broccoli for several years now at Epworth and it seems like a fairly easy plant to grow. We usually get one nice head of broccoli and then after the main head is cut we get some smaller litte florets.

Chives

The chives at the Epworth Veggie Garden are doing great. The picture above shows how the chives look now. I'm posting a picture below from mid-March of this year so you can see how much the chives have grown. Chives have a beautiful pinkish flower that you can eat. I've seen lots of salads decorated with chive flowers. Fresh chives have a very strong onion/garlic type smell. Chives go great with potatoes. We typically cut the chives with scissors down to about 1 inch from the ground. They will grow back in no time and you can have lots of chives all through out the gardening season. These made it fine through the winter and were one of the first plants to bounce back. The original chives were a gift to our garden from one of our neighbors. Looks like they are ready to be divided and shared with others.

Spring at Epworth Veggie Garden

Things are growing good up at the Epworth Veggie Garden. The strawberries are beginning to bloom which means that strawberries are not far behind! I forget the exact variety of strawberries that we have planted in the garden (they were a donation), but they are "June-bearing" strawberries. A couple of years ago we started with strawberry plants in a small area in a mini raised bed. Now the strawberry plants have multiplied and we continue to replant the strawberry plants back in the raised beds and share plants with others.
The onions are growing nicely also. We are using a technique from a group called Technology for the Poor. We have a small plastic wading pool with holes around the edges for drainage. We have a mixture of top soil, peat moss and manure in the pool. We hope to work with Job from Ascension Lutheran Church to implement these pools as a type of "home gardening kit". The onions are doing great in this container.