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Welcome back, Garner Growers!
We’ll have the first workday of the year this Saturday, beginning at 10am. Looking at the week’s weather forecast I expect it to be soggy, so don’t wear the new white sneakers you bought to celebrate the arrival of spring. If it is too wet, we may not be able to plant, but there is plenty of other work to be done.
Here’s what I have on my list:
- spread pine shavings over the mud in the chicken pen. We let that go a little too long.
- smother more weeds with newspaper, cardboard, and mulch (if you have any newspaper or cardboard you’d like to donate to the cause, please bring it!)
- cover the corn patch to solarize weeds and prevent new ones from growing
- clean out the storage side of the chicken coop – mice made a mess with feed and egg carton Styrofoam (bonus points if you knew Styrofoam was a trademark and has to be capitalized – I didn’t!) Kristen has caught the mice, but I guess we need to assess what containers for food would prevent a similar invasion in the future.
- if we have enough muscle, I’d like to move the chicken tractor to a spot on our future flower garden site and throw as many chickens as we can catch in there to start cleaning and fertilizing that site.
- I have wooden letters for kids to paint to label our vegetable beds so that if I can’t make a workday in the future, I can write on the white board ‘Weed Row C’ and it will magically happen in my absence.
- I’d love to get someone to measure the beds and create a new garden template to track what we plant. I’ll bring grid paper.
- William is itching to turn the compost. He had that look last night.
Please send me an email if you have any suggestions for the list.
If we can plant, I have onion and leek seedlings that need to go in the ground. I started some cabbage seedlings. We can plant those or let them grow for another week. We need to replant the lettuce bed with new seed to fill in the holes. I have a few herbs we can plant – cilantro and fennel at least, although they don’t make good companions and shouldn’t be planted near each other.
If you can’t make it Saturday, we’ll be out again Tuesday afternoon at 5pm. Good news: we won’t have to water either time!
Hope to see you in the garden…
