Into the season of renewal

We planted the garlic, and finished sowing the cover crops.  After a long season of abundance and growth, it’s now the season of renewal and reflection.

We’re still harvesting some fall crops, and there’s lettuce in the greenhouse, but the Food Bank will need to purchase produce for the winter. Sigh. But it’s for the first time in 7 months! Yeah! And we’ll do even better next year. We’re already starting to make plans for how to increase our production, and help others grow food for themselves, and the Food Bank.

Garden Coordinator, Cary Peterson, will heading off to India for a month. Molly Zeiger, our Americorp volunteer, will be taking care of the winter garden tasks. Stay tuned for posts from Molly!

Making our new shed from an old barn

Our trusty little metal shed has been filled to the bursting this year with fertilizer, tools, wheelbarrows, seeds, and miscellaneous garden supplies. We need more storage room, and an indoor place for volunteers to gather out of the cold and rain.

From Mildred and Al Anderson’s fallen down chicken barn built of old growth fir in 1936, Keith Fallows cut out the walls and end pieces for our “new” 10 ft x 12 ft garden shed. We pressure washed it, and Bayview High School students helped move it to it’s staging place.

Peter Bennett donated a platform, already constructed, which we moved to the garden, and then built the floor.

We put the walls up 1-2-3-4!

Youth from the Alternatives-to-Detention work crew of Island County Juvenile Court carefully salvaged the rough cut 2 x 6 rafters from the barn, and pulled out all the nails.

The rafters were put in place.

And we’re ready for the roof!

Meet Molly Zeiger, Americorps volunteer

A big welcome to Molly Zeiger, our Americorp volunteer in the Good Cheer Garden, and in the Food Bank. Molly started working in September, and will be staying til next July. Below, she shares a bit about herself and her impressions so far. Stay tuned for more postings from Molly in the future!

“Let me start with how much I appreciate South Whidbey and Good Cheer. I love the wet climate and artistic culture of the Pacific Northwest. Although I plan to expand my horizons, I cannot imagine a more refreshing place to be all the time. South Whidbey is perhaps the perfect example of my ideal environment as I have found it to be a goldmine of interesting, active and artistic people surrounded by inescapable natural beauty.

And Good Cheer is so impressive! I have volunteered enough time to know what a huge accomplishment it is for a nonprofit to be self-sustaining while serving the needs of a significant percentage of the population. Good Cheer’s success shows great talent behind the scenes, tremendous community support, and a valuable mission that I have had no problem getting behind.

Before coming to Langley, I was working seasonally in Talkeetna, Alaska, after graduating with a degree in Peace Studies and Sociology from Whitworth University in Spokane. I spent my college years studying social justice and volunteering with vulnerable populations. That naturally led me into a term of service, related to community engagement. I share my AmeriCorps commitment between the Good Cheer Garden and the South Whidbey Commons coffeehouse program.

While I am here, I hope to help implement a sustainable and efficient system to turn healthy harvest from the garden into appreciated meals on the table. So far it has been a humbling learning experience.

Just after two months, I feel enriched by the garden and the wonderful people it has put me around. I’m really excited to keep working with Good Cheer to promote healthy living and help give everyone the opportunity to have fresh food. I feel truly blessed to be in a community where everyone is so focused on each other.”

Potato box harvest

We tried the potato box method of growing spuds, building the box and planting them in the spring, and then adding sections going up as the vines grew. We had a larger box 3 ft x 2 ft, and a smaller 1 x 1 ft box in the square foot garden.

The larger box was a disappointment. Some potatoes grew in the soil above the ground, but not many. Not looking good for potato boxes as a space-saving way to grow.

But the smaller box worked beautifully, and demonstrated the potential of this growing technique. In that little 1 x 1 ft potato tower, we harvested a 5 gal-bucket of spuds, more than in the larger one! In the photo you can see how the potatoes grew. A success!

We got it right with the soil mix, watering and variety of potato on one, but not the other.  More learning curves!

End-of-the-season Appreciation Potluck

It’s been an incredible year for the Good Cheer Garden! After such a bountiful year, we’re now putting the garden to bed for the winter.

To celebrate our first year, we’re having an end-of-the-season

APPRECIATION POTLUCK
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12th, at 6:00 pm
At the Good Cheer Food Bank,
2812 Grimm Rd., Bayview

We’ll also be celebrating the many community growers who provided fresh produce in abundance. Together, we provided thousands of pounds of fresh, healthy food for the Food Bank!

Bring your family and friends, let’s enjoy food together, and give a round of appreciations to all the hard working gardeners and donors!

Getting the garden ready for winter

We are continuing to harvest our fall crops of kale, chard, leeks, winter squash, pumpkins, parsnips, rutabagas, bok choi, broccoli and carrots, and the still-ripening hoophouse tomatoes.

For the beds that aren’t growing any fall or winter crops, it’s time to put them to rest for the winter. Because our soil is so sandy, we’re adding more organic material in the form of compost and aged manure, and turning it in. Then, we’re sowing a cover crop mix of annual rye, fava beans, austrian field peas and crimson clover.

It looks like lots of grass is growing in our beds, but the cover crops will hold the soil and take up nutrients as they grow, thereby reducing the leaching from winter rains. In the spring, 3-4 weeks before planting, all that nutritious vegetation will be turned over to compost back into the soil, nourishing it. So, this winter, we aren’t growing food, we’re growing healthy soil!

Fall comes to the garden

Fall has come to the garden with an early frost! The squash vines all dead, revealing the colorful abundance of pumpkins and winter squash. The bountiful basil now brown.

But there is still plenty that continues to grow! Fall broccoli and chard, plus kale, leeks, bok choi, carrots, parsnips, brussel sprouts and rutabagas.

We’ll harvest almost a thousand pounds of winter squashes and pumpkins: delicata, sweet dumpling, sweet meat, hubbard, and sugar pumpkins. The Sungold cherry tomatoes in the hoophouse are still producing, and we’ve brought in the green tomatoes to see if they will still ripen.

We’re on the Farm Tour!

The Good Cheer Garden is on the Whidbey Island Farm Tour on Saturday, Oct. 3rd and Sunday, Oct. 4th!

The Farm Tour is a free self-guided tour of 20 working farms on our island featuring locally grown food and products.

For maps and brochure go to http://whidbeyfarmtour.wordpress.com/

You can also pick up maps at the Good Cheer Garden, and many other farms, on the day of the tour.

Enjoy touring our beautiful island and see what the other farms are growing, and come see what we’ve been growing for the food bank.

(We also need volunteers to help during the tour, so let us know if you can lend a few hours to welcome tour participants to the garden and share informational material.)

A great harvest festival!

The weather was perfect, the music fabulous, the food delicious, the workshops informative, and the garden just sparkled. The First Annual Harvest Party and Music Fest was a great success! Truly a moment to savor all our hard work, and enjoy the bounty and beauty of what has been created. For more photos and acknowledgments, go to http://goodcheergarden.wordpress.com/events/celebrations-at-the-harvest-party-and-music-fest-2009/

Volunteers grow the garden

Along with sun, soil, seeds and water, it’s the work of volunteers that have grown the garden. Over two hundred volunteers have helped! http://goodcheergarden.wordpress.com/helping/thank-yous/

Our thanks to professional photographer Mary Lou Harris, who volunteered on a Wednesday work party day in August and photographed some of us as we harvested and planted. Enjoy her photos below.

Group photo from left to right: Caroline Winzenreid, Janet Ploof, Mosa Collins, Cary Peterson, Liz Kilmer, Maya Kilmer.

Liz Kilmer harvesting carrots, and children from the South Whidbey Children’s Center washing them.

Bean teepees and Caroline Winzenreid harvesting bush beans.

Maya Kilmer harvesting beans, and Mosa Collins harvesting kale.

Janet Ploof harvesting chard, and Shawn Morris and Judy Bierman planting lettuce starts.

Our thanks also to Mary Lou for taking the new banner photo for the Good Cheer Garden blog!