Growing food for a hunger-free community
It was a busy first Wednesday work party of the season!
Instead of creating the beds and sifting rocks and roots out as we did last year, we turned over the cover crop planted last fall, and found lots of big worms!
The overwintering kale beds were weeded, and the pallet compost bins moved in preparation of terracing the hillside.
And a new tool shed arrived and was set up! http://goodcheergarden.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/a-new-tool-shed/
We needed more room for all the garden tools. Then, Jane Seymour donated a shed, Jim Pugh moved it, and Paul Rempa installed all the fixtures!
Now all our tools are organized and hanging nicely, and we have space in the metal shed for the wheelbarrows and other large equipment.
Thank you!
Hooray, the garden shed now has a recycled metal roof! We’re having our first Wednesday work party on Feb. 3rd, and it’s wonderful to know that if the weather is windy and cold during our work breaks, we have shelter! Now we’ll start working on the steps, windows and door.
On our wish list is a 36” x 80” door with glass. Let us know if you have one to donate!
A big thank you to Keith Fallows, Robert Lowey, Marcia Wiley and Peter Martin for raising the roof!
It’s been a warm January…. could it be an early spring, or we will be hit with a hard February freeze?
The multiplier onions, chives and garlic are growing…
New leaves of kale are starting to appear…
The calendula is sprouting…
Even the Orcas pear is starting to bud.
Now is the time to watch it unfold… and mulch the garlic in case that freeze comes!
Sunshine, blue sky and warm weather was a delight for the 35 volunteers who descended upon the Good Cheer Garden for the Martin Luther King Day of Service. Everyone did an amazing amount of work, and the garden is ready for the coming season!
http://goodcheergarden.wordpress.com/helping/thank-yous/
The Inca Alpaca 4-H club took on the rabbits, and installed chicken wire around the entire perimeter of the fence!
The 4-H’ers dug a shallow trench outside the fence, and folded the chicken wire at a right angle so that 2 ft went vertical up the fence and 1 ft went along the ground, thereby preventing the bunnies from digging under the wire. Then they backfilled the trench. It was a huge job, well-done, and completed in a day!
Volunteers also put skip sheathing on the garden shed, and we’ll be installing the metal roofing next! (Our roofing work party is Sunday, Jan. 24th, starting at 10 am.)
We double-dug beds and buried compost in the subsoil, and cleaned up all the frozen, mushy old broccoli plants. The garden was transformed!
Volunteers also built a 3-bin compost system with pallets at the Bayview School Garden, and set up drip irrigation at the Langley Middle School Garden. All wonderful improvements!
As icing on the cake, Sandy Goddard came with the oil painting of the Good Cheer Garden that she had painted this summer as part of the Plein Air Painter’s U.S. Open (outdoor landscape painting) http://www.pleinairopen.com/. Her painting now hangs in the Food Bank, but it will take a place of honor in our Resource Shed as soon as it’s ready!
It’s our first year anniversary- we launched the Good Cheer Garden on the Martin Luther King Day of Service last year!
We spread composted manure, cleared out scruffy shrub trees on the garden edge, and dug out blackberry roots.
Now the garden is established, and it’s time to get ready for the upcoming season!
Come join us on Martin Luther King Day, on Monday, January 18th, from 10 am – 3 pm to:
* Install chicken wire around the bottom of the garden fence, together with the Inca Pride Alpaca 4H Club. Save our future carrots by keeping out the bunnies!
* Clean up and start terracing the hillside where the squash was
* Sort the Ed Hume seed donation by planting dates
* Clean up the compost area, and make compost with alpaca manure
There’s also lots of Martin Luther King Day gardening activity at the other community gardens providing produce to Good Cheer:
The Langley Middle School Garden work party is from 10 am – 2 pm: Help install the irrigation infrastructure.
The Bayview High School Garden work party is from 10 am – 2 pm: Help build a 3-bin compost system with pallets
Thanks for helping all the gardens grow!
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!
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!
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.”
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!
