A Gardener's Retreat

Hello Gardeners!

You may have heard by now:

The Retreat is in a state of flux due to the closing of the VT State Hospital after Hurricane Irene flooded the facility in Waterbury. Last week, VT announced it would not be reopening the hospital, and the Retreat may be a new resource for mental health services that were once provided by the state.

Sandy met Nov. 1 with Brenda Nichols (Executive Assistant to CEO) and Peter Albert (Director for External Affairs) of the Retreat. Currently, they need approvals from the legislature to act on a plan to expand, and therefore break ground at the garden site.

They are willing to let us continue to garden there, as long as we would be willing to move out at a moment’s notice, which could very well happen midsummer- a decision could be made as of the 2012 (Spring) VT Legislative Session.

At the same time, Post Oil Solutions is interested in seeing the community garden project fledge. Their mission is to start projects that would ideally spin off on their own.

The garden leadership team met tonight to discuss priorities at this time. Here’s what we think the garden membership should know:

1. We want to find a new umbrella organization (a non-profit that would act as a fiscal agent). Groups that seem worth researching right now include the Windham Foundation and CABA (Community Action Brattleboro). Its possible we could increase our funding resources with a move to a new umbrella.

2. We are looking for a new site.  Oddly, Carole was recently approached by a private land owner who expressed interested in providing space for community gardening. We have also had some contact with SIT about our need.

3. We are negotiating a refund from the Retreat.  With funds to work with, we may be able to recover from an as yet unplanned relocation- not without a loss-, but with a good foot forward.

4. We are supposed to have an election for new Leadership Team Members.  We would like to start the process of identifying interested gardeners by inviting them (or any garden member) to join a 2012 planning committee.  A meeting schedule for the committee has not yet been established. Please reply to this email if you are interested in joining this committee.

5. We don’t know yet what the committee will decide, but there is a very good chance we will not be gardening at our current location in the spring.  We need to remove all interior fencing and debris from the garden by Thanksgiving, either way. Otherwise we risk leaving a few responsible souls to deal with it! Whether we stay or move on, we will require that returning gardeners be Gardeners in Good Standing. This clean up item will be part of that consideration. Mark your calendar for a November 12 burn-pile and end of season party. (More to come….)

Thanks for bearing with us! We would have set a burn pile date sooner- but this has been a sorting process that has had a timeline of its own. Your ideas and concerns are welcome!

Cheers,

Lisa Kuneman

As the season winds to a close, it’s fun to see how much has happened in the herb garden since we started working on it early this summer.  The plants that were mere pipsqueaks back in June are now large established plants.  Several are trying to take over their beds and many are simply thriving.  If you haven’t already, take the spiral path (marked in straw) around the herb garden.  We’ve made a major effort to re-label everything for easier identification (we can’t blame Irene, but the names on our old labels washed away).  And we’ve tried to keep up with weeding and trimming so you can make it around the path in unobstructed fashion.

The best part about the herb garden for me is the texture and the fragrance.  All the plants have their own personalities, some of them rather weedy personalities, one must admit, but it is an herb garden after all.  A few, like the pineapple sage, lemon verbena, and holy basil, release their heavenly aromas on touch.   Others must be approached only at certain times such as the monarda, which gives off a delicious lemon scent at dusk.  Valerian, beloved of bees, has a fetid odor which is not to everyone’s taste.  Wormwood is downright stinky, while the various culinary herbs are various kinds of savory.

But just as the smells of the herb garden are intoxicating, the sights have their allure as well.  We planned the herb garden to include herbs as well as some plants more prized for their flowers.  Monarda is herbal as well as floral, and so is calendula.  The basils all make white or purple flowers as does the anise hyssop, which becomes covered in purple spires that are in turn covered by bees.  The borage make blue to magenta falling stars.  There are odd-shaped flowers everywhere if you really look.  And of course some garden stalwarts, such as salvia, coreopsis, snapdragons, and zinnias.

We’ve been promising a garden tour for a long time, so here goes:  if you would like a guided tour of the garden by one or more of the herb gardeners, feel free to join us at the garden this Sunday, September 18, at 1pm (during community gardening hour).  We’ll be on hand to take you through and tell you about the plants.  Also, in a few weeks, we’ll be doing the first annual herb harvest.  Labeled bundles of culinary and tea herbs will be made available to anyone who’d like some.

Want more? Here’s a photo gallery of herb garden pics showing its evolution this year.  Our photos pick up right after we dug and cleared the circular bed (alas, no before shot).

We hope you enjoy the herb garden as much as we have making it.  Happy gardening, everyone.

The Herb Garden at A Gardener’s Retreat Community Garden is finally starting to look like an herb garden!  Herb gardeners Lise, Annie, and Chris have all been hard at work, filling the garden with plants, tending and weeding, and recently laying in a layer of leaf mold.

Mullein Seedling

As planned, the layout is more or less as follows:  flowers in the front by the garden entrance, culinary herbs in the half of the garden closest to the entrance, and medicinal plants toward the back.  We expect the addition of new plants to be ongoing at this point.

In the medicinal area, we have first-year mullein, wormwood, calendula, monarda, sage, yarrow, and skullcap, among others.

In the culinary section, there are a great many plants, chiefly thyme (two kinds!), sage, parsley, winter savory, apple and peppermint, basil, pineapple sage, and tarragon.

Flowers are still a bit thin although we have wonderful healthy Coreopsis clumps in front (the large yellow flowers) as well the aforementioned Monarda, which gives off the sweetest lemony aroma when you walk by.  We’ve added Obedient Plant (thank you, Jane) as well as Evening Primrose, Echinacea, Salvia, and Snapdragons.

One interesting discovery:  the two tall plants that resemble milkweed turn out to be Elecampane.  Who knew?  Fortunately, we  didn’t weed them out pending identification.  You’ll recognize them by their yellow, thistle-like flowers and fleshy leaves.

Donations are still being accepted.  Just leave your labeled plants by the entrance to the Herb Garden and we’ll put them in for you.

We hope everyone enjoys the garden almost as much as we did planting it.

The Gardener’s Retreat Herb Garden team has been busily working on the rejuvenated herb garden, and we’re happy to report that we’ve made some progress.  The beginnings of a structured (but not too structured!) herb garden are in place, some herbs have been planted, and we’ve even labeled a few of the early arrivals.  There’s still lots to do, but we feel good about where we are a month into the season.

We started the project by defining the perimeters of the herb garden space; in this case, we laid out a circle with a piece of twine which we had tied to a stake in the center of the circle.  Nancy and Chris dug a border all the way around so we’d know where our circle was.  After that, we all weeded and dug for all we were worth until the garden was clear of tall grass, roots, stray apple mints, and the like.  In the process, Lise discovered a very strange cache of soft round fleshy mushrooms under a patch of grass.  Not wishing to disturb them, she left both the clump of grass and the mushrooms in place.

Once the entire circle was cleared out, we weeded and shaped the perennials that were already there.  This included large clumps of yarrow, bergamot, irises, wormwood, coreopsis, skullcap, and other carryovers from the old garden.  Although not all of them are “herbs” in the usual sense of the word, we thought they’d earned their place.  We also kept a few wildflowers here and there, including black-eyed susan, bladderwort, cinquefoil, red clover and sheep sorrel.  Some are pretty, others medicinal; all are indigenous to the meadow.

The next step was to lay in paths with straw.  We had originally conceived of a sort of medicine wheel pattern with paths leading into the center from the four directions.  Although appealing, the garden itself resisted the design, putting large established plants everywhere you wanted a path to be.  In the end, we let the garden tell us where the path was and so it spirals in from the entrance on the left.  Users of the  garden will notice that the shortest distance is not the path between two points but we hope that everyone will relax into the meditative spirit of the place and use the path (although I have caught myself hopping between points on the path more once than while planting).

Although there is still more weeding and clearing to do in places, we’re starting to put in plants now so they’ll have time to establish.  If you have herb plants that you would like to donate, please leave them at the herb garden next to the straw pile at the entrance and let us know what you left . We’ll get out there and find a place for your plants, either in the herb garden itself (on the medicinal or the culinary side) or in one of the flower beds.  Please don’t plant things yourself as there is a method to our madness, and we want to make sure everything goes in a good spot.

Finally a word about usage:  It’s our goal to have enough going on in the herb garden so that people can pick a bit here and there.  But please don’t pick just yet as most plants are very small.  Once things get big enough, feel free to take sprigs as you need them, but remember that 30 families are using this garden and leave plenty for others to enjoy.

We’ll have more herb garden news later, when we have a little more to talk about and show.  Once the garden is more planted out, we’ll do a tour for gardeners and friends.

The Fence

We plan to get the poultry wire all the way around the garden this Monday (6/3) from 6-8 pm. Please come and help the fencing team with this push. Its a big job. Most important: wear bug spray!

Leadership Team

From February this year, the leadership team (LT) was made up of a handful of people who wanted to rethink the organization of the garden to resolve past challenges. This group had hammered out some working policies for moving forward, created a successful membership drive, and negotiated a relationship with Post Oil Solutions and a lease with the Brattleboro Retreat. As of May we had 3 LT members- all of whom are volunteers: Sandy Pagniucci- Community Liason, Carol Crompton- Treasurer, and Lisa Kuneman- Facilitator.

The LT added 2 new members and an Herb Garden Manager in May: Sharon Barnard is filling the LT role of Gardener Rep (albeit a modified version of the role as spelled out in the 2011 policies), and Chris Bates is the LT’s Special Project Coordinator. Lise LePage, who created and maintains our website, is working to revitalize the community herb garden.

Regular Leadership Team meetings are held on the 3rd Monday of each month, from 6-8pm at 72 Main Street (downstairs in the Brattleboro Food Coops offices). Any body can come.  To add an item to the agenda, contact Lisa at this email address (agrcg1@gmail) prior to the meeting.

Mowing

As of last week, Special Projects LT member Chris Bates gave up on trying to fix free, broken donated mowers and purchased a new mower! Without a shed to protect it from exposure to the elements, we need to figure out a plan for using it. As far as a system for mowing goes, we know this much… (See our new post Mowing News for more.)

Pathways

This year we have had lots new members join! This is exciting. It’s also an opportunity to review some expectations that help us maintain neighborly relations.  If you plant, or leave items in the pathways, it can impede mowing efforts and trip up gardeners who are navigating the pathways with their hands full or with the wheel barrow.

How’s your garden growing?

June is well underway, we’ve had typically variable New England weather.  What’s working so far? What isn’t working so well? Are your seeds coming up? Did you lose anything to too much rain? Have you seen the bluebirds nesting in the box just outside the fence? Have you been attacked by swarms of mosquitos in the evening? (I have!)

Send your personal garden news- we’ll share it via email and on the website. Looking forward to hearing from you all!

Lisa Kuneman
for AGRCommunityGarden

At the Community Garden, gardeners sign up for teams to do various jobs around the garden.  In addition to the Leadership Team, there are teams in charge of fencing, mowing, special projects, and the herb garden.  All teams are underway.

The fence team has done an amazing job, digging a trench and laying in an underlayer of chicken wire to (hopefully) deter groundhogs.  A mesh deer fence will follow.

A mowing team has been assembled and the garden has both a scythe and a push mower.  Both tools work fine if you want to mow around your plot.  Chris of the Special Projects team has offered to fix a power mower for garden use as well.

And finally, the herb garden refurbishment has begun, with a center established and a perimeter dug.  Now we’re clearing out the grass and  cleaning up the perennial herbs that are already in the garden.  We’re hopeful to have the plot cleared in the next two weeks, and then we’ll be ready to lay paths and put in some new plants.  At that time, we’ll put out a call to any community gardeners with herb plants to contribute.

When you add in all the gardening folks have done in their own plots, the garden is coming along well this year.  If you have time after your chores, take a stroll around the garden and see what interesting things other gardeners are doing.

Community Gardening Hour
Sundays at 1:00 &
Wednesdays at 6:00pm

Hello Fellow Gardeners:

Would you like gardening time to double as a social event?

Would you like a chance to ask others about their gardens in person?

Or a chance to ask for others’ advice?

Community Gardening hour could be all that!

Let’s see how it goes for a few months.  Your feedback (positive & negative) will help determine what phase 2 of community garden hour should look like.

Should the time change? Should it be once a week?

Please post an email message, or a note on the bulletin board.

Cheers,
Lisa Kuneman
for the Leadership Team

First garden orientation gets started

A Gardener’s Retreat Community Garden hosted its first orientation session for new gardeners this Saturday out at the garden site.  Despite threatening weather, around 20 gardeners, most of them new this year, assembled at the garden circle to learn more about the garden and receive their plot assignments.  They were even patient and good-humored with our “Garden Hose Pantomime, ” cheerfully traipsing through the meadow in silence to observe me acting out getting water from the cottage next door.

Our new gardeners are a diverse group, with more than a few very experienced gardeners, including several with degrees in agriculture.  Everyone seemed ready to go although the cold wind and imminent rain kept all but the hardiest among us from doing much more than surveying our domains.

The second orientation is Tuesday, April 19 at 6pm for those who missed the Saturday session.

And finally, a quick reminder: if you haven’t signed up for your garden job yet, please submit your first, second, and third choices by email to: agrcg1@gmail.com, or, if you don’t have email, you can let Lisa, Sandy, or Carole know your preferences.

Gardeners chat and explore after the orientation

New and returning community gardeners — please join us at the garden for a kick-off orientation meeting.  Two orientation sessions have been scheduled for April; see below for dates and times. Gardeners can attend either meeting to learn everything they need to know to start off the 2011 gardening year at A Gardener’s Retreat Community Garden.

April 16 2011 at 12:00 PM

April 19 2011  at 6:00 PM

All new and returning gardeners are required to attend a garden orientation meeting.

The meeting will be held at the garden and should last about 45 minutes.  Bring a seat if you’re worried about wet grass and benches.