Leave-ing the Garden

I have been busy with my son's soccer games (also on Saturday mornings and Wednesday evenings), but I'll share an update. Scott says that they'll need help boosting the soil with leaf compost in October and then "putting the garden to bed" with a leafy quilt in November.

RAZZberries!

A quirky cult-favorite movie of mine is Thoroughly Modern Milly. I have no idea why the old lady likes to say "Razzberries!," but I don't blame anyone for liking these heavenly gems. Instead of working at the Community Garden, my family went to Payson and picked raspberries. By the end of the day, we had 18 pounds of raspberries, 15 pounds of peaches, 5 hens, and tummies that had happily consumed blackberry ice cream, peaches, ratatouille, pumpkin cheddar pasta and rote Gruetze (a northern German berry dessert). We had also visited with friends and family, finished reading Black Beauty and "missed" the big game.

Guilty Pleasures

With my 4 kids in tow I had good intentions of putting in a full evening's work last Wednesday. Unfortunately, my son loves honey and is terrified of "bees" (mainly hornets and wasps). A hornet really liked the honey he'd wiped on his pants at snack time. My son completely fell apart. (But amazingly enough he picked raspberries for 2 hours on Saturday-see next post-without a worry). Needless to say, we only put in a few minutes' work. Which is why I felt guilty to have the pleasure of eating this juicy cantaloupe and these succulent grapes. The grapes came from a volunteer who had extra. I learned that cantaloupe is ripe when it falls easily from the vine. And by the way--the yeast wasn't much of a snail bait, but copper wiring has been an awesome snail/slug deterrent for my lettuce seedlings. I guess the copper shocks them (I'll have to research that one). Oh, and I don't feel guilty about that.

The Root of All Evil

Ralph declared war on the red root weed this summer. I told him good luck. In May I named crab grass as the enemy and set about digging out every offending blade. Then the clover spread like a plague and I now have lawn that looks like a map of the earth. I picked 273 red root last week and only about 34 on Saturday because we arrived late and had to leave early. Tired of picking weeds, I found the tomato harvest more rewarding. My daughter and her friend enjoyed windfall crab apples, but helped a bit too. Lettuce is coming up in my own garden (I set out yeast bait tonight to ward off snails). We'll see how that goes.

Language of Food

By 9:30 Saturday morning we looked like a stand at the Farmer's Market. Pictured here are regulars and newcomers (at least three others worked but were not in the picture, including me). I'm grateful that the Community Garden can help compensate for my mistakes. In my own garden, my winter squash and pumpkins had too much nitrogen (from chicken manure) so they grew a lot of vines with few fruit.

I mainly learned some Spanish vocabulary for weeds and insects. I found out that the weed we call 'red root' is actually grown and cooked for food in Mexico. The name I understood was 'treis.' (And here we grow and sell a lovely Mexican weed called poinsettias:). Some helpers today spoke English and Samoan, one spoke Spanish and the rest English. But when a fellow gardener shared a cucumber drink, we had no difficulty understanding how to "share and enjoy" the bounty. We had 10 overflowing bags composed of chard, tomatoes, cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, corn, carrots, patty pan squash, green beans and onions.