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)!

Rubik's Cube

We had a work night yesterday at the Walnut Hill Community Farm and we painted the shed! You'll recall, it used to look like this:



And now (at least one side of) it looks like this:



!!!!

And another side looks like this:



It's a work in progress, but it was a lot of fun. Although at one point I wondered if more paint ended up on the girls' clothes than on the shed . . .

(Please excuse the crappy cell-phone pictures of the painting process, I failed to bring my camera to the work night. But it's July, these things can be excused.)

Pretty Things

I've been having fun making "inspiration boards" for my wedding over at Style Me Pretty. It's a great way to focus my ideas about what I want the colors and style to be. Plus, I get to look at pretty pictures of pretty things. Isn't that what planning a wedding is all about? (Besides the whole marrying your best friend part).



Lately I've been thinking a lot about fabric pennants, strings of large clear bulbs, mason jars, old fashioned lace . . .



. . . delicate frosting flowers, tiers of rich cake, various shades of yellow and cream . . .



. . . bright goldenrod and magenta hues, bird-cage veils, butterflies and bees, honey . . .



. . . and saturated light.

Sharing the Wealth

Last week I spent a few hours with Kelly and Meg from Future House Farm, talking about community gardens! They're about the embark on a fabulous project and they're doing a bit of research beforehand. We had a great time, eating at a nearby cafe and then taking a little tour of some community gardens (we only made it to three before the heat beat us). It's always interesting to meet people that I've only known in blog-land, this is only the second time I've done it. Check out Kelly's report of our afternoon on their blog.

The First Pickles of The Season

On Saturday my friend JJ and I bought some pickling cucumbers at the farmer's market and set to work making the first pickles of the season. They're fermented, so they're garlic pickles instead of vinegar pickles like most of the ones we made last year. I followed the tried and true recipe from "Wild Fermentation," and it was the fastest ferment ever! They were done in four days, I guess because of the heat and humidity. They're supposed to take a minimum of 1 week to properly ferment, so it's a good thing I checked on them . . .

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 . . .

Navigating the Urban Jungle

For the past few months I've been sending out feelers to see what kind of opportunities there are available to me to try to make a little extra cash. In May, I stumbled across this brand new garden store in South Philly called Urban Jungle, and with M's help I pitched a workshop series to the owner and he was enthusiastic about it! So now I am the Horticulturalist and Educator at Urban Jungle, where we have workshops every Thursday on a variety of topics. Below is a picture of my little set-up in the store last week, before I started teaching my class on Gardening for Butterflies and Hummingbirds. You'll notice a batch of freshly baked cookies in the tupperware with the green lid.



It's not a full time job by any means, but it's an exciting opportunity. Attendance has been patchy, but I'm learning a lot about promotion (some of it from my in-house DJ who has lots of experience). So check us out on Facebook, and if you're in the area come on out to a class! (The next class is for families; it's called Salsa-in-a-Pot and you can register here.)

Goodbye Camden

At the end of this week I will be leaving my job as Community Garden Organizer at the Camden Children's Garden. Here are some parting photos I took this month of some of the gardens I've been working on this summer: The Cramer Hill CDC garden, a new community garden with HUGE raised beds - probably 20 by 20 ft, and one of my favorites, the St. Anthony's Community Garden.


Cramer Hill CDC Community Garden


Check out the size of those beds!


An incredible melon trellis at the St. Anthony's Community Garden


When the melons start to grow, they will hang down from the trellis and this gardener will support them by making a sling with pantyhose and tying it to the bamboo!

********

My work in West Philadelphia on community gardens and urban farms continues, so stay tuned to see what exciting things are coming up next!

Garden Update - St. Bernard Community Garden

The cool weather crops are taking their last stand and the warm weather crops are coming on strong. At the St. Bernard Community Garden we've got red and yellow onions, broccoli, kale, swiss chard and cabbage, along with tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. And a zinnia border is popping up at the south end of the plot - I can't wait for vases full of zinnias on my table!



But these pictures were taken about a week ago, before the crazy storm we had on Thursday. It only lasted for about half an hour, but it did a lot of damage to the vegetation in the city. 75 mile per hour winds and marble-sized hail will do that. The leaves of my veggies are all tattered and broken, but hopefully they will perk up again soon and start producing. And I've already harvested a cucumber from one of my vines, so I have hope!



At The Woodlands Community Garden the potatoes are doing their thing, and there are more tomatoes and peppers growing. There are also sunflowers and eggplants, and I planted some winter squash and melon seeds which have already sprouted.

Happy Gardening everyone!