The Lovelady Center Victory Garden

24 Jul '08 7:46 am

Peach pie and blackberries !!yummy.In our intensive dairying region,blackberries are sprayed so that you rarely see them nowadays.I grow cultivated ones on my fence,but they don't taste the same as wild ones.

25 Jul '08 8:18 am

Hee hee. What a funny idea - an excellent idea! I can see a new future for thousands of old bedsteads and wrecked cane conservatory chairs... Well, this is surely a great example of indoor outdoor flow!

5 Oct '08 12:01 pm

Just popping in to share the good news. We found a benefactor who bought us 200 more recycled railroad ties, with which we can build 18 more beds. Here is a picture of the pallets of ties that have been lifted up to the top level. Tomorrow, we have a group of teen volunteers coming to help us move them tomorrow afternoon.

8 Oct '08 3:59 pm

That looks like quite a big operation you have there. Those ties look to be at least 8 feet long. That is a lot of rail road ties. The little arbors do make the beds look all the more like .. well .. beds.

10 Oct '08 5:57 pm

What a wonderful example of generosity and community spirit your rooftop garden is! Smile

10 Oct '08 11:24 pm

It is great to see that this excellent project has retained its momentum... how about a report one season on, Faith? Has it all been worth it?

Congratulations on all that has been achieved!

11 Oct '08 5:27 am

As I mentioned in my last post we were expecting a group of teen volunteers from a local church on Sunday afternoon. As it turned out we had about 100 and what dynamos they were. They laid out all the new beds (14 in all) and spread gravel in the bottoms of as many as possible before the gravel stockpile ran out. They also spread landscape fabric over the gravel. Now all we need is a little more gravel and lots of soil. I've been working on that this week and hopefully have arranged for some more deliveries of free soil. On top of all this, one of the young men who came with the volunteers has a company that makes organic vermicompost and regular organic compost. He has promised to bring us some loads of both. And, one of the regional plant producers brought us eight flats of fall cole crops (lettuce, broccoli, collards, cabbage) and they have promised to bring more every week. Adding these to the collards, snow peas, limas, rattlesnake beans, collards and turnips we had already started from seed will make a lot of winter veges. A friend has obtained about a hundred free bare root strawberry plants for us, so in a couple of years they should be harvesting fresh strawberries.

It is truly amazing what has been happening this summer. We had tomatoes, peppers, squash, okra, cucumbers, melons. pumpkins and sweet potatoes. Some of the crops were more successful than others, but with only eight beds for vegetable production, we were not able to get enough crops to supply their kitchens. Instead, the residents were told to come and pick whatever they wanted and come they did. We also taught gardening classes to the children in the summer camp.

With 25 beds altogether, we should be able to produce some sizeable crops for next year. I will take some photos of the new beds tomorrow and post them later.

11 Oct '08 12:03 pm

Thanks for the update. How wonderful, especially for the kids I think. I really think it's good for kids to learn to appreciate nature and growing things and so on. Sorry that's not very articulate, bit distracted this morning.

12 Oct '08 11:39 am

I can totally relate to distraction MacFlax. Thanks for your interest. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera today, so no pictures yet. I promise I will get some ASAP.

The Lovelady Center Victory Garden

yummy

tomato beds

Hooray, more railroad ties!

Wonderful!

What a difference a week makes!

Distraction