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

If you have a fence around your individual plot- please control the grass on either side of it- or even think about taking it down now. Fences need to be down come November 1 at the latest. Off season work on the pathways require this. Thanks all!

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.

But before we get to recapping the year, the garden is still producing hot peppers, chard, kale in abundance, and carrots.  The flowers look nice and I’m just letting them go now, since there’s little else  going on.

The tomatoes are gone by, the zucchini (we barely knew ye!), the sad little non-starting cukes, all gone.  We didn’t do beans out of fear of bean beetles but people got through the season without any real trouble with them this year.  Unfortunately, the squash bugs made a reappearance and allowed us one lovely two week window to harvest zucchini before devouring all remaining members of the squash family they could find.  So, no cucumbers this year, which was too bad.  I’ll have to go back to scaring them away with strong herbal mixtures.

We got some beets, a few big ones and a lot of little ones.  That was fun.  The carrots were disappointing in their germination rate but what we got were pretty good.  I need to get those seeds in earlier I think.  It warmed up and dried out by the time I got carrots in the ground, and they don’t like that.  Radishes were stellar — tasty, prolific, and huge.

Lettuce did nothing, again, due to timing of planting seed.  I lost two important weeks in mid Spring and paid the price.

Swiss chard did very well, on the other hand, and we enjoyed lots of it.  I planted rainbow chard this year and it made lots of it.  My one error was planting about a dozen borage seeds in the same bed.  Mistake.  Borage are huge enormous plants with many flowers and arms and giant leaves and monster hairy stems.  One would have been sufficient, two on the outside, with lots of room around each plant.  That said, we got lots of chard.

Kale is also ridiculously healthy, as it usually is.  I allowed about six plants to grow.  Again, too  many.  One of each of two different types would be ample.

We enjoyed our garden, as we do every year, and continue to have ideas for improving our harvest.  I have a couple books on improving soil and getting more out of a small plot that’ll make good winter reading.  I also have homemade wood ashes to spread which I’m hoping will decrease the soil’s acidity as well as a bunch of kitchen compost to spread once the plants are cleared out for the season.  This was a good year.  Next year will be even better!

Mowing
Again, Hoorah! We have a power mower and a reel mower, a system for gas and for rotating mowing shifts, and one more weed-whacker rental really helped get things moving.

Please take a look at the pathways around your plot and ask yourself: is there anything going on here that would make it challenging to mow around my plot? Keep the mowing team in mind- and feel free to mention how great things are looking- and how great thingshave been looking, due to the mowers who independently took mowing in hand before we had a system up and running.  Thanks all!

Water logistics
Carole will be organizing the water workers. If you have water issues or special needs, please contact Carole (cmcrompton@comcast.net or 254-4833) so the water workers can take these needs into consideration when making their plans.

There has been an issue with the spigot near the garden.  Please note- when there is an issue with the spigot we are free to get water from the house until it is resolved. We are working on communication with the Retreat in order to understand and resolve the issue.

Leadership Team Meeting
The regular, monthly LT meeting is scheduled for Monday July 18, 6pm-8pm. It’s held at the Brattleboro Food Coop’s offices (Main Street- through the door between Fireworks’ two windows). Garden members are welcome to attend.  If you’d like to bring an item for discussion, please email Lisa in advance.

Rule Change: At the last meeting, the LT  voted to allow the use of plastic mulch in the garden.

Meeting Minutes Archive
Lise LePage (AGRCG website manager and iBrattleboro co-creator) has posted an archive of meeting minutes for the Leadership Team at the AGRCG website.

Speaking of the AGRCG website, have you seen it?  Here’s a link: http://blueworld.org/garden/   Lise recently posted a very good read about tests of her garden’s soil quality (ph, etc).

Is there something you’d like to post? Send it in! Garden photos are welcome (even hoped for), too.

A Note About Potato Bugs
Potato bugs are here- so if you have planted potatoes, please remove and destroy them (all three stages) on the leaves. Otherwise everyone’s plants will become infested. The bugs weaken the plants making the potatoes susceptible to late blight.

Community Gardening Hours
If you’d prefer to go to the garden when you might find others gardening, we’ve posted community garden hours

Sundays at 1:00 and Wednesdays at 6:00, for you and for those who feel similarly. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on it, and whether you make a point of gardening at those times or not.

Mulching Time
The weather is warming up- and its a good time to mulch if you haven’t yet.  With the and cooler temperatures and rain we’ve had- this hasn’t been critical. The sandy soil tends to dry out fast in hot, drier weather.

Happy Gardening!

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.

We spent an hour or so at the garden this morning, planting herbs in the Herb Garden and looking after our vegetable plot.  The rain last night seems to have come in the nick of time for our chard which was starting to tire of the heat and dryness.  Everything else looks great — a bountiful feast for the eyes as well as the palate.

We harvested a bunch of gigantic radishes, so gigantic that I have been jokingly referring to them as “radish gods,” after the character in the animated film Spirited Away (highly recommended, by the way).  The watermelon radishes did exceptionally well, and have been making large to giant radishes that are mild but firm fleshed and look just like watermelon when you slice them up.  We’ve been enjoying them in salads for weeks now.

"Prize" First Zucchini

Over in the zucchini patch, we have exceptional productivity on the part of our pair of cast-off starts.  We harvested two nice size zucchinis today and have four or five more still on the vine, so to speak.  One plant seems to be producing more than the other, and we’re not sure why.  But we think it will catch up over time.  Meanwhile, in the same general area, our seed-grown cucumbers are at the 6″ high stage and just starting to make flowers.  Can fresh crunchy cucumbers be far behind?

The big excitement is the tomato plants which are tantalizingly covered with hard green tomatoes.  Only the Sun Golds are starting to ripen.  But I was pleased to see that a bunch more tomatoes have formed and it looks like the Jet Star (highly rated by Walker Farm) is starting to come into its own.  Surprisingly, both the Black Krim and exotic Blue tomatoes are putting out lots of fruit too.  I had expected them to be a little less prolific.

Meanwhile, the Rainbow Chard is still making leaves but is suffering a bit of crowding from a flock of over-exuberant borage plants.  Borage is a giant of a plant, with fat, fleshy stems and large hairy leaves.  The flowers look like blue/magenta falling stars and are formed in profusion from large umbelliferous flower heads.  We grew ours from seed and based on how happy they are, I would say that’s the way to go.

Otherwise, the garden didn’t need much tending today.  We trimmed off some dead leaves, planted a few more carrots (why not?), and weeded, as always.  One of the plants we are NOT weeding out is the mullein, which happily seeded in all over our plot this season.  I love mullein for the wonderful cold and cough remedy it provides; this year, I’ll have plenty of organically grown leaves to dry in advance of the winter flu season.

The first step, according to Stell, is to figure out what kind of soil you have, so in an effort to answer that question I did a couple soil tests on the soil in our plot.  This soil is somewhat better than what would be there otherwise, but is still pretty close to the basic garden dirt that we’re all dealing with.

The first test I did was a “structure” test.  I took a set of four samples from different parts of the garden, and took them in such a way that I got a slice of dirt from the surface down about 6 inches.  I mixed the samples together and then put about a cup and a half in a mason jar, to which I added water to the very top of the jar.  I then added 1/2 teaspoon of ‘natural’ dishwashing liquid and shook the jar.  Over the next couple days, I watched and waited as sediment layers developed.  The results are shown below:

My amateur assessment of what I saw is that the dirt I sampled is about 97% homogeneous sandy loam, with another 1-2% dark organic matter, and a trace amount of outright silt. (The silt is that fine powder that lies on top of most of our garden plots and tends to blow away when it hasn’t rained in a while).  The sand in our sandy loam is fine grained with just a bit of grittiness when wet.

One noteworthy tidbit:  it took a long time for the some of the silt to settle out of solution. Moreover, the water that remained never did completely clarify — some of the silty clay remained in solution a week after the test.

pH Test Tube

On to the pH and nutrient tests.  I will admit, I did not spend top dollar on my test kit.  It was a RapiTest product that cost $5.98 at Agway and has enough test tubes and test chemical capsules to do 4 pH tests and 2 each for Potassium, Phosphorus and Nitrogen.  After much mixing, shaking and adding of water (making me feel a little like a Junior Chemist), I succeeded in capturing some results.

Here’s how the least improved soil from our garden plot tested out:

pH – very acid – 5.0 or below
Nitrogen (N) – very low
Phosphorus (P) – low
Potassium or Potash (K) – very low

I was not at all surprised by these results.  The soil samples I took were from areas where I hadn’t added any soil amendments recently, so it was to be expected that soil fertility would be low.  I was a little surprised by the acidity as I would have thought that the absence of leaves and evergreen needles in our plots natural compost would have kept it more neutral.  Not so, as it turns out.  My sample tested unmistakably acid.

While a number of vegetables will grow in soil with a pH of 5.0 and up, my researches tell me that they are happiest in the 6.0 – 7.0 range.  However, Stell says that if you add lots of organic matter (humus, compost, leaf mold, manure), your plants will be able to tolerate greater acidity.  The task for me is to figure out how to raise the pH of  our plot into the neutral range.  I’d like to do it without adding lime, so now I’m looking at mulches again to determine which is the most ‘neutralizing.’

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.

I did a little research and learned that leaf mold is a great source of organic matter for gardens.  Fortunately, that’s something we have in abundance at home, so we carted large batches of it over to the garden in tubs and added it everywhere, but especially in all the places where we knew our future crops would want rich soil.  That was a good start but I wanted more, and soon I had my sights on the Nature Mill XE Plus Indoor/Outdoor Composter.  My father-in-law obligingly bought me one for my birthday and since then, we’ve been able to side dress the more hungry crops with homemade compost.  It’s pretty hot, having only seasoned a few weeks, but our plants seem fine and if anything, beefier than usual.

Today, we checked on everything after the rain and were impressed with how much our seedlings and starts have grown.  The beet and chard circle in the middle of our space is packed, and although I had thought I was planting sparsely, it looks like at least a few of those borage plants are going to have to go somewhere else…  The kale is also performing well, and the tomatoes too.  Over in the squash patch, the zucchini are puny but have lots of flowers, whatever that means, and the cucumbers which I planted recently are struggling up at a glacial rate.  But I have no doubt they’ll be flourishing soon enough.

Cedar Waxwing - Masked Bandits of the Birds

The surprise for this week was the radishes, which had been producing big bushy tops and puny radishes.  I thought the soil was perhaps too fertile and that I might not get much of a crop this year.  But today, I noticed a large purple radish bursting out of the soil under a giant leaf top.  Hmmmm, I thought — that doesn’t look underdeveloped.  So I looked around some more and noticed that I had a few other radish gods going that had come out of nowhere.  Across the aisle in the other radish bed, the radishes were large but not huge, and the tops less bodacious than those of the first set.  So I’m guessing that the big tops do have overly fertile dirt but nevertheless, they are making big radishes so I can’t complain.

Pest alert:  if you’re wondering what got your strawberries, it was the cedar waxwings (a type of bird) who became bold and besotted with them just at the time they reached their peak of perfect ripeness. Alas.