By Sarah West
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! As many of you know, in August, we formed a partnership with the town of Garner to turn the back portion of Thompson Road Park into a community garden. (See our previous blog post for more info)
We are so excited to share our progress!
Our allotted area is just over an acre and our first goal was to mulch the entirety of it in preparation for gardening. This entails laying cardboard down to cover the weeds and finding enough cardboard (Thanks, Pam!) to do this in the first place. After the cardboard, we then layer six inches of mulch. This will help kill the weeds and prepare a good base layer for our raised beds. Can you imagine how much work this is?! Thanks to the help of so many volunteers we are almost done with this task ahead of schedule.
We also planted a landscaping buffer of close to one hundred small trees and shrubs along the south side of the garden along the property line. This was a tremendous amount of work; measuring the tree locations, loading and unloading the heavy trees, prepping the holes with the auger, and then planting the trees and filling the holes back up.
Last but definitely not least, we have begun to build our raised garden beds and we hope to get some spring crops planted by mid to late spring! One of our newer members Joe O’ brought a group of volunteers from Starbucks to begin building the beds and they did a fabulous job as you can see in the picture below. But don’t worry, there is still plenty of work left for our garden members to continue!
We are so thrilled with how far we have come! We have had some really fabulous work days and many people have shown up to share the work. Garner Grows is forty-eight member families strong and growing! If you would like to join or need to renew you can Become a Member HERE, or Renew Your Membership Here.
2023 is looking to be a bountiful year!
In the next two months we have a lot planned. In February, we will begin installing and filling the raised beds; planting berries and pawpaws; and prepping the area for our orchard. In March, in addition to regular workdays, we will have a mushroom log workshop and seed starting workshop (tentatively scheduled for March 5 and March 26). Our workdays are usually Saturdays 10:00am – 1:00pm. For more information on workdays and upcoming events you can sign up for our Mailing List HERE, or check our Public Calendar HERE.
