April showers

With the more seasonal weather has come some (much needed) rain. I missed the window for planting earlier this week, before the rain hit on Friday. A number of returning community garden members did plant their plots before the rain, so they are in good shape for the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I'll wait for the ground to dry out. The tilled area has begun to take on some outlines as I've marked off three new beds for members and several other beds that will be used for kid's education and demonstration, including the Junior Master Gardeners club.

Tuesday evening included a joint presentation at the library with Community Garden member and owner of Broadview Wildflower Seeds John Clayton entitled "Rain Gardens and Gardens for Butterflies, Birds, and Native Bees." We had 10 people attend, a mix of those who had already implemented some native landscaping on their land to those who were considering the idea. John did a great job outlining the fragile state of many native plants, birds, butterflies, and bees in Iowa, thanks to tremendous habitat loss and chemically intensive agriculture. He emphasized the importance that even small native wildflower gardens can do to provide habitat and food for native wildlife, which depend on the presence of native plants to survive and thrive. Planting even a small area with rarer native plants can have a great impact when it may be one of the only areas in that town or even county that has that plant. We ended by highlighting the two upcoming hands-on workshops in the Community Garden, one at 10 am on May 12th to establish a rain garden, and the other at 10 am on October 13th on to create native wildflower garden. John has compiled a tremendous amount of information and links on his website. Check it out for more information on native plants and gardens.

On Thursday afternoon, 20 kids ranging from 3rd through 6th grade, gathered in a science classroom at the Grinnell Middle School for the first Junior Master Gardeners class. Through the controlled chaos of the class session, we managed to create a "paper towel garden" that will be 'transplanted' into the Community Garden in a couple of weeks. The kids got to choose what they wanted to plant, then, based on the spacing of square foot gardening, they folded their towels into different parts and lightly glued either 1, 4, 8, 9, or 16 evenly spacing seeds to them. Or, if they plant they choose would be transplanted, they marked the spot where it would be planted with an 'X'. We then arranged the paper towels on the floor to simulate the layout of the garden. There are lots of distinctive personalities in the group and overall they were really engaged with the material. I'm looking forward to seeing how they will react as we move into doing more outdoor garden work in the next several weeks. The next Thursday session will be taught by Jodie Gatewood, an Iowa State Extension outreach specialist, about food preservation. She will also teach an adult class later that evening, at 6:30 pm at the United Methodist Church in Grinnell.

We held our first community garden member meeting of the year on Thursday evening at the Drake Library. Nearly all the members were able to attend. Last year we didn't hold a beginning of the season meeting and I felt that we never really had the members in the same room or at the garden at the same time. I never actually met face to face one of the members! She was the mystery member - we only corresponded through e-mail and phone. I wanted to avoid that this year and make sure all the members could not only meet each other but also hear about the common expectations and guidelines of the garden. Also new this year are volunteer groups. Members are part of one of three groups (maintenance, workshops, or member events) and sign-up to help with a certain number of events or tasks. I hope that it will be a way to make membership in the garden more of a commitment and to start building a sustainable structure for getting all kinds of work done, from outreach to weeding. Another benefit of the meeting was the chance to give away a lot of the seeds I have accumulated through Seed Saver's Herman's Garden donation program. I scattered seed packets across the big wooden table in the library's board room and the members proceeded to comb through it for what they wanted to grow.

We also had the Grinnell Home and Community Expo today. For the second year, Imagine Grinnell hosted a Green Energy Showcase area within the Expo that featured vendors focused on conservation and sustainable practices. This year we had a great lineup of vendors ranging in focus from LED lighting and spray-foam insulation to native landscapping and vermi-composting. Imagine Grinnell put up two booths and dedicated part of one to the Community Garden. I was happy to find out that many people were already aware of the Community Garden and some were interested in the workshop schedule for this summer. It was also good to educate people about the garden and make them aware of what it offers. I got an offer of tomato transplants from one person, sold some seed potatoes and leftover heirloom seeds from the Seeds to Grow fundraiser early in the year, heard about a community garden in Osceola on an old school grounds, and talked turkey about different kinds of raised beds and approaches to gardening with several people.

Expansion underway

After a short, warm winter, followed by a very warm, early spring, I already feel behind with garden work in early April. The ground was ready to plant with cool season crops like peas, radishes, beets, etc, by early March. I have to remind myself that in a normal year I would actually be right about on time. The cooler weather lately has been a good change from the unusually warm days and nights that had the season in fast forward. It now feels like everything can slow down and become more on pace with a normal spring.

This week we're well on our way to getting the Community Garden ready. Applications for membership were due last Monday and everyone who is receiving a plot will be notified this Monday. Once again we had more demand than I anticipated, which makes the the garden expansion even more necessary. Ann Brau, who runs Compass Plant CSA, came with her tractor and rotovator on
Thursday and this morning to till a section north of the existing garden and an area north of the shed for a new rain garden we will be planting in May as part of a workshop. The garden will receive overflow from the rain barrels that are placed on the north side of the shed. The tilling was largely successful and uneventful, except for a couple unseen metal fence footings that were churned up by the rotovator. During the approval process for the expansion, City staff had confirmed that there were no buried wires or pipes that we needed to avoid. But, no one knew about these old, forgotten fence footings (according to a neighbor, the area of Miller Park where the Community Garden is located used to be a sheep pasture before it was sold to the City). After hitting two footings in what was clearly the line of an old fence, Ann avoided the rest by tilling farther away from the shed and I laid down newspaper and cardboard to kill the grass where she couldn't till. The next steps will be to lay out pathways and beds, delegate beds to new members, and start planting.

After the expansion was tilled, I took a walk around the garden to see how much more weeding needed to be done. It is interesting to see what comes back each year after winter that you don't anticipate. I expect to see the perennials in the herb bed like oregano, sorrel, and chives come back and the garlic to sprout through the straw mulch (although not nearly as early as it did) but I have been surprised by some 'volunteers' that are making an appearance,
including clusters of tomato seedlings in one bed (looking like they sprouted in March), well developed lettuce and thousands of fennel seedlings in another bed, and several forgotten onions in a third bed. Of course, there are the weeds too. Lots of curly dock (from a contaminated load of compost), lamb's quarter, creeping charlie, crabgrass, and others. This time of year, though, I don't mind weeding as much. They are patchy and the new roots of the weeds come out easily.

End of season clean-up

The garden is now back to where we started in April, a blank slate of raised beds and dirt, but with some signs of everything that has happened this season. Since April the cinder blocks have taken on a colorful coat of paint thanks to the kids from Galaxy Youth and the Grinnell Summer Camp and those raised beds have produced a tremendous amount of biomass, which now sits in a tangle of vines and stalks next to the compost bins. The shed next to the garden has also been cleaned out, organized, and prepared for a winter of storage. The rain barrels are drained for the winter and their valves are left open to let any rain or meltwater that comes into the barrel between now and April run out.

The garlic has been planted and mulched under a thick layer of straw for the winter. It will be the first plant to emerge in the garden next March and April. While the mulch seems like it is meant to keep the garlic warm during the cold weather ahead, its most important function is actually to protect the garlic du ring the periods of thaw and freeze that occur in the late fall and the late winter. By acting as an insulating layer and keeping the ground at a steadier temperature during those periods, the mulch prevents the garlic from being pushed out of the soil by

frost heave.

Today we took a composite soil sample of the Community Garden to send in for testing at the Soil Plant Analysis Lab at Iowa State University. A composite soil sample just means that I took a trowel full of dirt from each of the eleven raised beds, put them all in a clean bucket, mixed them together, and then removed a cup and half of the mixed soil as the overall garden sample. For $8 the lab will provide test results for pH, phosphorus and potash. By learning the pH of our soil, we'll find out if we need to adjust it up (with lime) or down (with spagnum peat moss). Plants require a certain range of pH in order to be able to take up nutrients, most plants between 6 and 7 on the pH scale. If the pH is above or below that, the plants have a hard time taking in essential nutrients like phosphorus and potash which, along with nitrogen, are the key nutrients needed for plant growth.

Presenting at the Rotary Club

I was invited to speak at the Grinnell Rotary Club tonight by Lowell Bunger, a member of the Community Garden this season. As a kid, Rotary Club was one of those anonymous community organizations that I knew from the logo I saw on signs and held events at the firehouse. Now that I'm working on projects like the Community Garden, I realize the value of service clubs like the Rotary Club and how they help to bring together people from around the community on a regular basis. I presented about Imagine Grinnell, my Americorps program, and the Community Garden, starting with its beginnings in 2009 and going through what we hope to accomplish this coming year.

I asked the Rotary Club to sponsor the use of two plots by low-income families/individuals or students so that we can make becoming a garden member as accesible as possible and to also sponsor the construction of three new beds to be used by different youth groups in a Junior Master Gardener program next season.

$2500 for MICA food pantry!

We received notice this morning that Imagine Grinnell received $2500 from the Theisen's More For Your Community Grant! The grant will be used to buy a new refrigerator for thefood pantry so that it can accomodate more fresh produce, particularly from the Community Garden, the new Grin-City Collective garden, and local growers. Imagine Grinnell was one of 92 winners from a pool of 165 applicants around the state.

Seed donation

At the end of the summer hardware and garden supply stores get rid of their leftover seeds so that they can have fresh seed the following spring. While germination rates do drop when using older seed, this seed is still, for the most part, perfectly good to use. These stores can be a great source of free seeds for community gardens.

Thiesens in Grinnell recently donated all of their leftover garden seed, 120 packets of vegetable and herb seed and 100 packets of flower seed, to the Community Garden. We will use the seed in the garden next year but we will also give a lot of it away because there is far more seed than we can use in our limited garden space.

Weeding Workshop

Thursday, July 14th at 4:30 PM
Purpose: To learn and share techniques to keep your garden weed free.

Community members are invited to learn strategies to eliminate weeds without chemicals and to enjoy a more weed-free garden this year and in years to come. Topics covered will include: common varieties of weeds and their life cycles, different types of mulch, cover crops, weeding tools, and organic herbicides.

There's no registration or participation fee - just show up in your work clothes and sturdy shoes and be ready to share and to learn! There will be a range of tasks for all abilities, including creative garden activities for children, so bring the whole family!

The Community Garden is located in Miller Park near Lake Nyanza, just beyond the High Street entrance near Washington Ave. Contact Jordan Scheibel at jordan.scheibel@gmail.com or call 236-5518 for more information.