Sitting Pretty

Diggers:

Our garden is so lush and productive. It is gorgeous to look at, tasty to harvest from, and so very easy to hand pull weeds out of the loamy soil in which the edible vegetables we planted are thriving.

The lasagne gardening technique we deployed to build the soil is clearly a raging success. Building our own soil from freely obtained mulch proved economical (we saved thousands of dollars), easy (oh, we sweated, but not as much as we would have scraping away the sod and piling truckloads of bought topsoil on top of it then fighting off the grass that would have come back this spring), and so effective (fertile, organic, exquisitely healthy soil!)

As you’ve probably heard, we’ve caught the eye of some granting and awards panels who will be touring our garden this week on Wednesday and Friday. We had a hearty work bee tonight during which we fought back some vegetation off the pathways, trimmed the grass around the garden, leveled our mulch and compost piles, and planted a beautiful apple tree with 5 zone hardy branches grafted on it, a plum, and a beaked hazelnut shrub. What a productive evening.

We also slapped several thousand mosquitoes, so if you visit the garden, please wear bug protection. All that rain has the mosquitoes thriving too.

For the rest of the summer until harvest time and Shedtemberfest (stay tuned for more details) we’re sitting pretty. When you visit the garden, please focus on any of the following tasks:

• Make something prettier — tidy, yank and tend. We’ve got to keep our pathways visible and our garden weed free. Weeds get tossed in the garbage, everything else (yellowed leaves, etc.) can go in the composters
• Eat something: just now there is kale, basil, oregano, chard, lettuce, sugar snap peas, spinach, baby carrots and lots and lots of beets. Eat fresh veggies on the spot or take them home to process. Fill your belly, fill your freezer!
• If something looks thirsty, water it! Fill a watering can at our watering station (on the South side of the Parkallen Hall)
• Tend the composters: add organic materials (your kitchen scraps are welcome), fluff and turn the compost, or water if it looks dry

As always, e-mail sustainability@parkallen.ca to join us or with your good ideas.

Inch by inch,

Marlene
Director, Parkallen Sprouts