Sweeping up the leaves

It's Thanksgiving already! October and November have flown by, but here's a little snapshot for you:

** Black Swallowtail caterpillars on the fennel at The Woodlands Community Garden **



** Tree delivery at dawn, followed by many many volunteer tree planting events for work **









** A trip to the Philadelphia Zoo (the oldest zoo in the country) with some new friends **



** Lots of baking! **





I'm continuing my quest to perfect my apple pie recipe this fall, along with tweaking my presentation (see how I made it look like an apple when you cut it in half? clever clever me).

** Sukkah! **



We built a temporary structure called a sukkah on our porch this year in honor of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The holiday is a celebration of the harvest (and other religious and historical events) - the sukkah is open to the stars on top and filled with plant materials. Ours was decorated with paper chains, gourds, fruit, chestnuts, mums, fabric and drying bunches of herbs.







After we built and decorated it, we invited all of our friends to eat with us under the sukkah. Even though it rained during most of the week long holiday, we shared two fabulous dinners with friends and family. And it only took us two extra weeks to take it down!

That's all for now, I hope to post more frequently once I get a new laptop. This little setup that I have right now is driving me crazy, and I think it's time for a new computer, don't you?

Happy Halloween!

We had our annual pumpkin carving party at The Woodlands Community Garden last weekend. Unfortunately, due to a timing mistake on my part, we were carving pumpkins by flash- and candle light! Whoops. But everyone had a great time anyway.



Especially the squirrels. Not even 24 hours after I put this beauty on my porch it looked like someone had taken a shot gun to it. The squirrels must be incredibly hungry in Philadelphia this year.



My friend Alex and I went to a party last night dressed as the Baseball Furies gang from The Warriors movie. Scary! Happy Halloween everyone!

A Sweet First

Last week while I was digging up the last of my potatoes in The Woodlands Community Garden, I accidentally dug up some of my sweet potatoes! This is my first time growing sweet potatoes and I didn't realize that they could actually root along the vine, creating more tubers as they go. Like this:



(from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/botany/sweet-potato-info.htm).

Sweet!

August Harvest

What a doozy!

I harvested the following from both the St. Bernard Community Garden and the Woodlands Community Garden this morning:

• 'Katahdin' and 'Yukon Gold' potatoes
• one tiny (and slightly tasteless) watermelon
• habanero peppers
  
• 'Sungold' and 'Tomaccio' cherry tomatoes
• 'Long Slim' cayenne peppers
• a 'Cherokee Purple' and two other tomatoes
• red onions
• an eggplant
• leeks
• deformed, end-of-season cucumbers

Then I made home fries for lunch.



I am loving this weekend. The weather is gorgeous (back in the mid-eighties) and my lovely friend and former CA room-mate Crystal is coming for a visit! Enjoy your own weekends and this fleeting end-of-summer feeling.

2010 ACGA Conference!

Despite my current lack of funds, I managed to register and get transportation to the 2010 American Community Gardening Association's Annual conference this weekend! With lots of help from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and Green Thumb (the NYC Dept of Parks and Rec's community gardening program) I will be traveling to Atlanta, GA tonight on a bus from NYC. I get conference registration (which I already secured a scholarship for), round-trip bus fare, and a shared hotel room for the low low price of $0.00. Amazing. I mostly have Sally to thank, my wonderful friend at PHS who does the community gardening program there. I had an incredible time last year, and I can't wait to be inspired and energized again this year. The bus ride is over 16 hours though, so thank goodness for my new quillow.

Here are some current pics from the community gardens to get you excited. Also, I just found out that The Woodlands Community Garden is in final judging for the PHS City Gardens contest, so keep your fingers crossed again for us to win!


**Walnut Hill Community Farm, with painted shed and 1,000 gallon water tank!**


**Incredible shed organization at The Woodlands, thanks to Joe (who also re-roofed the shed and made the picnic table**


**Red pontiac potatoes, katahdin potatoes, some mystery blue potatoes, and a cayenne pepper from The Woodlands**


**St. B garden overflowing with zinnias**


**St. B garden harvest**


**Joy**

Garden mascot

The Woodlands Community Garden is flourishing! We've built four more beds this month, which allows eight more people into the garden.



And we have a new mascot! Meet Bootsy Collins. This is the least blurry picture I could get of her. She's a West Philly mutt that Nic adopted and she's incredibly well behaved for a stray.



I've been harvesting cayenne peppers, potatoes, chives, and basil from my plot so far, and tomatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and winter squash are on their way (among others)!

Green and Growing

Ask and you shall receive. It started raining Friday night and the entire Philadelphia metro area breathed a collective sigh of relief. The weather has cooled down and our rain barrels at the Walnut Hill Community Farm are completely full. I got a helpful e-mail from Carol, a reader from the Pittsburgh area, reminding me to secure them to the shed because they are incredibly heavy and could cause injury, so that's our next priority over at the farm.



As for The Woodlands Community Garden, we had a work day this weekend and built four more beds! This means that we can invite eight more people to join the garden. The waiting list is down to only a handful of people now, which is a beautiful thing.



The bed that M and I tend is looking kind of bedraggled because of the haphazard way that I tied up the potatoes. But it gets them out of the way of everything else that I've planted in the rows: hot peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, melons, watermelons, winter squash, basil, leeks, chives, and sweet potatoes.



We also decided to celebrate the fact that the garden is one year old by having a little potluck party after the work day. It was delicious, as usual, and a nice break from the hard work.



And today the judges from the PHS City Gardens Contest come to judge The Woodlands Community Garden. It was really fun to talk to them about the garden, we've done a lot in only one year and they were sufficiently impressed. Fingers crossed!


*** Check out the wildflower meadow at The Woodlands where we relocated our bees. They're very happy.***



At the St. Bernard Community Garden things are also growing nicely. I've harvested a few cucumbers already and nibbled on some cherry tomatoes. There's still kale, swiss chard, beans, onions, peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and lots and lots of zinnias growing.



I planted four different seed packets of zinnias along the border, so I plan on seeing more views like this all summer:



Happy gardening everyone!

Rain Garden

At The Woodlands, things are moving right along. We've sorted our donated lumber in order to make a picnic table (which is in progress right now), and we planted a rain garden!



Gardeners Mandy Katz and Todd Greenberg from Bartram’s Garden generously donated the plants to us (and Mandy suggested the idea in the first place, she's one of our brand new gardeners!).



A rain garden is planted in a depression where runoff from surrounding impervious surfaces (like asphalt and rooftops) can be directed. The plants help the water soak into the ground instead of running off and causing erosion and pollution of surface water. Our rain garden is in a depression where water naturally collects from the surrounding asphalt, and water from the roof of the neighboring building is diverted to the spot (the black tube in the photos). We’ve planted wetland-tolerant plants, some of them native. Inkberry holly, Ilex glabra ‘Densa’; white turtlehead, Chelone glabra; swamp hibiscus, Hibiscus moscheutos; and Joe-Pye weed, Eupatorium fistulosum.



This kind of action will become increasingly necessary for storm water mitigation in The Woodlands and surrounding areas because residents of the city of Philadelphia will soon be charged for the amount of storm water their property produces. Here’s the Philly Inquirer article about it.

The plot that M and I tend is also doing incredibly well. We harvested lettuce and kale (to freeze, I'm almost kaled out for the season), and the potatoes are coming up (4 varieties). I'm afraid that we planted more than the space can handle, but that seems to be the case every year, so time can only tell!



The other gardeners are also doing fun things with their own space. The plot behind ours has a huge bean trellis, and another one has a large, elaborate cage around it (this was originally to keep out the deer that lived in the cemetery). When we designed the garden we decided to build 8x8 beds and split them between people, so as to maximize wood and the number of gardeners participating. It's worked out wonderfully, and it's been fun to see people making new friends, figuring out how to share their space, and being creative!