Castle Street Community Garden Day April 11, 2010

We had another fabulous day in the garden! We had a good turnout and got a bunch of plants in the ground. We planted tomatoes, sunflowers, calendula,  and cilantro. 

It was a good day for planting. It was also a good day for harvesting. Below is a photo of Toni and Ethan harvesting one of out looooong anticipated cabbage. We planted these cabbage back in the fall and for a possible variety of reasons they never really thrived. They looked like they were going to go to seed and not get much bigger so we decided to harvest one of them. I'll post an update on the others next week.

It was one tough cabbage! My snips are also very loved, and so are very dull. I have not yet mastered the skill of blade sharpening. My efforts have the disappointing effect of making the blade more dull rather than sharp.

Regardless, Ethan met with success and held up his hard earned trophy- a tasty (hopefully) naturally grown, community nurtured head of cabbage. Good job Ethan!

Here is one our community supporters - Stefan Hartmann, owner of Black River Organic Farm. Stefan has helped all of the gardens I am involved with -- CSCG, Tidal Creek Community Garden and The New Hanover High School Garden-- with an abundance of seedlings. Not only did he bring by plants on Sunday, but also a parasite that preys on aphids that was hitchhiking with the plants!

Thanks Stefan!

 

That jug of brown water in the right hand picture is a gallon of compost tea available at Progressive Gardens located on Oleander Drive. Bring your own container and get a free gallon of this probiotic garden tea. It helps to replenish the microorganism populations in the soil. The microorganisms are beneficial to plants and soil health in many ways. 

Chris is working hard!

Tom and Angelica were kept busy planting tomatoes. We planted several heirloom varieties that even have exotic names. I can't wait to see what "purple zebra" looks like. Other on the roster include pink beauties, a white tomato, black grape and some others whose names I will get up soon.

Here are a few shots of the garden, late afternoon on Sunday.

Angelica took these two, I couldn't decide which one I liked better. That is mullein in the foreground with broccoli and collards gone to seed in the background and catnip peeking in from the left hand side.

This is Vitex, also known as Chaste Tree. This is a very fast growing shrub I am excited to have for it's medicinal properties and also because it provides a nice filtered shade for some of the herbs. I expect it to grow fast enough to be able to shade the herb garden this year. 

The much anticipated asparagus  has sprouted! We have four of ten crowns coming up! It's hard to see in this picture, but the asparagus is the green plant with a ring of darker soil (compost) around it. As it grows we will fill in the trench. There won't be any to harvest for a couple of years, but the beginning looks promising! 

We did have one casualty - a snapped stem, so please be careful not to walk in the trench! I hope that crown will send up more spears, like the other three plants are doing.

Some more pictures of the garden. Enjoy!

 

The Blizzard of '10

March 27, 2010  

 Here are a couple of pictures of the "Blizzard of '10 that hit on February 13, 2010.  When I moved to Wilmington, I knew that I was going to have to say good bye to regular winter snow. I go back to NJ every winter, so it was a loss I could take. When I woke up on this morning and recognized that hush that always settles after it has been snowing during the night, I crept out of my warm bed, put on boots s and went outside to marvel at the snowy wonderland in the blue dawn, just as I had when I was a kid.

  This is the view from my front door.

Below are some of Castle Street Community Gardens.

This is our children's garden. Toni and her son Ethan have been the main contributors to the garden. Tom constructed the PVC frame and provided the landscape  fabric to make our easily movable greenhouse. We have harvested oak leaf lettuce, mustard greens, bok choi and broccoli that was started back in January. 

 

The entrance to the garden is just to the left of this shot. 

From the front of the garden looking back.

        

Something about a cardinal in a green tree covered in snow is another image that reminds me of snow days in New Jersey. 

  

There are plants under much of that snow!

I was worried that our rain barrels might freeze, but they were just fine, it definitely didn't get that cold. In fact it was such a warm, wet snow it was practically gone by the end of the day. 

All that remained by the day after were randomly placed mutant looking snowman dotting muddy lawns.

  

This picture was taken right next to the children's garden towards the back of the space.

These are the trees behind the garden. 

This is part of the culinary and medicinal herb beds. The shrub sticking up is a lemon verbana.

       

A Broccoli in disguise. I harvested the florets after they got a little bigger and it didn't seem that the snow had much affect on the flavor.

We didn't lose any of the plants to the snow, any that were damage were the transplants that got hit by the frost a couple days prior. 

The Greenhouse!

Since OC joined the garden crew a few months ago, he has been brining great ideas to the table. His first was to create the greenhouse you see below. It is made from locally harvested bamboo, reclaimed pallets and donated greenhouse plastic (thanks Matt!) 

It only took a couple of days to put up and is super toasty. We have been able to start our summer crops early without having to give up the dining room table!

Planting Asperagus! Part 1

I decided to try something new this year. One of the main reasons I wanted to be a part of a community garden is to grow perennial plants, or those that live longer than one season. I have been reading a lot about asparagus and wanted to grow some in the garden. Asparagus is a long term plant that takes several years to mature, but will then produce for over a decade if taken care of properly. 

The part of the asparagus that you buy at the grocery store is called a "spear" and is the new growth sent up by the asparagus crown, or root system. The picture below shows the asparagus bed we dug a few weeks ago. 

In order to flourish, the crowns must be planted deeply enough. The new shoots of a young plant are not strong enough to break through deep soil. A trench must be dug and then slowly filled in as the asparagus grows taller. The brown clumps you see in the photo are what they look like-aged horse manure.

We planted ten crowns in this bed and we plan to put in another ten. As of this post we are still waiting for the first shoots to come up. Apparently, asparagus grows very slowly.

March 24, 2010

So far to date, I am currently working on three community gardens and I network resources with one other garden. I started Castle Street Community Garden in downtown Wilmington with the primary goal of growing medicinal herbs. Being a renter, I don't have a stable patch of yard to grow perennial plants or cultivate annual(ly) expanding weed patches that herbal medicine makers love so much. The solution was to start a community garden that would be there no matter where I was.

In its' second year, CSCG continues to thrive. The soil is rewarding us for our hard work shoveling horse manure, turning compost and bringing in topsoil. The perennial herbs (most people tend to consider them weed) survived the "harsh" winter and are literally getting bigger everyday. Thanks to OC, the greenhouse he and Cole built, we will have a head start on tomatoes, peppers and culinary herbs.