This has not been a terribly productive week at the Stoddart
Avenue Community Garden, all things considered, but we have had several
blessings. Among them, we again received
more than an inch or rain. After all of my praise in last week’s blog,
Jason – one of our WEP volunteers -- did not show up on Wednesday or Saturday. He also did not call to explain why. On the other hand, Chris came on Wednesday,
picked berries for our food pantry donation and then got really, really soaked
when it began to pour down rain. Our
berry season is nearing its end and I was barely able to pick 2 pints
yesterday. But, if you snoozed and missed our plentiful berry harvest, Lynd’s Fruit Farm is selling u-pick berries for $3/pint in
Pataskala.
We received two large boxes of books for our free little
library from the OSU Urban Arts Space downtown in the old Macy’s department
store building on Town Street. I was
perusing the non-profit booths at the Columbus Arts Festival last month and met
Cali, who was volunteering for the Columbus Metropolitan Library. I wondered if it would be able to help us
keep our little library stocked. She
wasn’t sure about that, but she had two boxes of donated books which the Urban
Arts Space had been using as props during art projects. They had finished that
project and she was delighted to donate them to a good home.
This being a holiday week, I used lots of my home-grown and
hand-picked produce in my annual summer feast/cookout.
I had planned on serving my kale casaer salad for Independence Day
picnic, but I didn’t have enough kale (if you can believe that). It might have
something to do with all of the kale chips I made and ate last week. Anyway, I ended up making a couple of green
bean salads since I had a lot of those. Like last year, I made some red-white-blue
cobbler with sour cherries (that I picked at Lynd’s Fruit Farm last year and
canned because they lost their cherry crop to the polar vortex this year) and
black raspberries. I also added apples
that I canned last year, but they turned purple. I used
dill from my garden in my potato salad and frozen roasted red bell peppers in
another potato/bean salad.
On Saturday, Lea and Zion were at the Garden when I
arrived. She was busy weeding and he was
busy saving the world from space invaders.
When she finished, she took some time to weed Mari’s overgrown plot and
mulch her onions before picking up litter around the Garden. Neither of our WEP volunteers came, so I
weeded the raised beds next door, weeded my plot (and pulled a lot of chocolate
mint to pitch), tried to transplant some sunflowers and cosmos, thinned our
overgrown volunteer sunflowers and cosmos, harvested, and made our weekly food
pantry donation. Neal stopped by with
his girlfriend and visiting brother.
My half-runner beans are growing out of control so I picked
up some steel mesh at Lowes (for $7.25/each) to create two more trellises. This week I also harvested and dried some oregano since it’s supposed to be at its tastiest when it is about to flower and in flower. We shall see.
Our coneflowers, lilies and beebalm are still in bloom. My first sunflower also bloomed this weekend.
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