Success! (and more help!)

Thanks to everyone who helped Duffy fund his beekeeping project, he raised 141% of his goal!



This means that we will have TWELVE more beehives at The Woodlands, plus one at The Walnut Hill Farm AND a group of high school students learning how to keep bees and sell honey with us at the farmer's market! It's all very exciting.

Also exciting is Nic's novel that he finished and is getting ready to self publish! It's about the urban homesteading movement, and there's a character in there based on little old me. Read more about it here. Here's his Kickstarter page where he's raising the money to publish the novel. In return for donating you can get a signed copy of the novel, a ticket to the book release party where cool local Philly musicians will be playing, and even a secondary character named after you!



Thanks to everyone who has already donated to these causes and helped move us all forward towards a more sustainable, creative, and well compensated future!

(I'm also working on a Kickstarter page to help fundraise for UC Green, the wonderful organization that is Philly Rooted's fiscal sponsor and all-around chearleader. Look out for that in April.)

Fall CSA pilot

In the months of October and November, Nic and I ran a pilot CSA program from the Walnut Hill Community Farm. We offered six families a box of veggies every two weeks (a total of four boxes), and in return they came to a focus group to give us feedback for next year. It was pretty successful, and the best part is that we made some great friends in the neighborhood! And since I love taking pics of my own CSA box, you can imagine how many pics I took of the ones we were making up. Here are a bunch of them, and here's the post Nic wrote about it on the Philly Rooted website.

Week 1: Swiss chard, green onions, purple heirloom potatoes, beans, thyme, oregano, dill, cherry tomatoes and small bell peppers.





Week 2: Swiss chard, mustard greens, beans, rosemary, hot and sweet peppers.





Week 3: Swiss chard, mustard greens, kale, mesclun mix, dill, thyme and parsley.





Week 4: Swiss chard, beets, kale, mustard greens, thyme, parsley, dill and dried basil.

Veggies Powering Veggies

Nic and I delivered the second CSA box to our families in Walnut Hill: Swiss chard, mustard greens, beans, cayenne and habanero hot peppers, green bell peppers and rosemary.



We pulled the warm season crops and sowed cover crop; rye grass in the middle rows and clover in the long side rows, under the fall crops. The farm is looking good!



We also have some exciting news: Nic purchased a veggie truck! It's a small VW truck that is powered by diesel fuel and used veggie oil from nearby businesses. We delivered our boxes in the truck and were really excited to show it off. Veggie oil powering veggie delivery!

The Other Side of the Coin

The growers from the Walnut Hill Community Farm are all off to bigger and better things. But those darn plants keep growing! So what to do? Start a mini fall-season CSA!

We decided to do a very short pilot of a CSA this year to see how it would go and how much work it would be for the whole growing season. We have six families that are getting a delivery once every two weeks from the beginning of October to Thanksgiving. We had our first delivery and it was a lot of work, as we expected, but also a lot of fun!



The families are getting the boxes of produce for free, and the only thing they have to do is fill out a survey at the end. Though one of our families promised to pay us in sweet potatoe pie in November. We didn't say no.



The first box consisted of: one half pint cherry tomatoes and small bell peppers, one pint blue potatoes, one bunch green onions, two pints green beans, one bunch swiss chard, and one bunch each dill, thyme, and oregano.

Press

Philly Homegrown visited the Walnut Hill Community Farm recently and look at the beautiful pictures they took!

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**

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, rain

We have a shed! And a rain-catchment system! Things are really moving along with the Walnut Hill Community Farm. In June we built a shed, constructed a gutter system on the shed to funnel water into our rain barrels, had the first meeting of the community gardeners, started selling produce to the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill and at the Thursday Clark Park Farmer's Market, AND the Enterprise Center got a huge grant from PECO to start construction on the hardscape of the farm and pocket park. Wowee!



With the PECO money we've purchased a 1,000 gallon water tank that we will use to catch water from the roof of the SEPTA station that's next to the farm, and we plan to get a solar-powered pump to get the water up the slope to water the farm.



Now, if it would only rain . . .

Beautiful Progress

We've been holding twice-monthly work days at the Walnut Hill Community Farm and they are going incredibly well. At the last one, we planted, staked, and trellised our summer crops: over 20 varieties of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil. We also thinned our radishes and beets. The broccoli is coming along nicely (despite a little bit of mealy bug), the cabbage is starting to head up, and the kale is going gangbusters.













We also cleared out the weeds from the pathways between rows and laid down a bunch of salt hay to mulch. I think it looks terrific!







At every workday we attract kids from the surrounding houses and the general neighborhood; at one of the workdays in April there was a party happening down the street and everyone under 15 came over to help out at the farm! This is probably my favorite part about the farm.









Look for more updates as things progress!

First Sale!

This week the Walnut Hill Grower's Co-op had its first sale! The guys sold 9 bushels of kale to Milk and Honey Market in West Philly. Here are some pics of Dontae and Keenan harvesting and washing the kale at The Enterprise Center, and humoring me while I take photos of them during their first sale as a Co-op.





Here they are with Annie Baum-Stein, of Milk and Honey, our first customer. Thanks Annie!