Our cherry trees are blooming on time and look almost as
spectacular as last year. One thing,
however, is missing: The bees that
pollinate them. Last year I took lots of
pictures of bees in our cherry blossoms.
However, there is nary a bee in sight this year. Boo hoo.
The reason? Someone dug out and
stole our bee hive (which had been in the Block Watch lot across the street
under a former garage). So, even if
our blossoms survive two cold nights in a row, it will be for naught without
bees. Sigh.
It’s been a busy week at the Stoddart Avenue Community
Garden. Phil and Marcel wasted no time
in preparing and planting their plots.
Sabrina covered most of her plot of purple nettles with lawn fabric and
planted about half of it in with potatoes, beans, greens, lettuce, etc. Amy, Alyssa, Taylor and Carly have all
prepared their plots and partially planted them as well. Me?
Well, I’ve been busy with capital improvements and visitors. All I managed to get planted this week were a
few leeks, garlic, cold crops, and beets and some collard greens in the
neighbor plot. I was not able to do
very much weeding or get any start on the food pantry plots or to start my annual
herbs.
On Sunday, I stopped by for about an hour or so to start
draining the big tank so that Ken could fix the spicket. I visited Cathy while I waited, but barely
made a dent in the tank. I’m using a
cheap hose from home and it apparently is bent in a few places, which restricts
the water flow. I tried again for a
couple of hours on Wednesday, but managed to only get half another 100 gallons
or so drained. Gee whiz. Even six hours yesterday only got it down to
about 200 gallons. At least we are not
creating any more ponds at Kimball Farms.
We had a large crew around on Wednesday. Amy arrived first to weed and plant in her
plot before she returned home for dinner.
Then Sabrina came byt o put lawn fabric on her plot. The fabric is supposed to deprive the weeds
of sunlight, thereby killing them. I
think it would have been cheaper and faster to simply cover it with a cheap
black plastic tarp, but that’s me.
Alyssa and Taylor came by to prep and plant some brussells sprouts. I
formally measured and marked off the northern plots with stakes. I couldn’t, however, find twine to tie from
the stakes to the fence.
We had a couple of visitors.
Daniel from Four Seasons City Farm finally stopped by for a tour. He drives by and waves periodically, but he’s
never stopped before. He was dropping
$75 of beautiful strawberry plants off at Kimball Farms (as a fundraisers for
FSCF). He was intrigued by our
reluctance to till. Taylor and Sabrina
talked to him about when and why we till and why we generally do not. (I planted some collards while they
discussed this). He admired the quality
of our soil, made some suggestions, observed that our raspberries were planted
too close together (which made me laugh), and teased me about our disgruntled
neighbor. He was fascinated that I like to keep weeds in
the plots (with some exceptions) until I plant.
(I like to feed the microorganisms in the soil with live roots, etc.,
particularly chickweed). He was admiring
our flowers and suggested that I divide them (and give some to him). Someone
keeps stealing all of FSCF perennial flowers and then stole a whole stack of
t-posts that they need for their fence.
I offered to dig up and give him
some of our extra early daisies right there on the spot, but he demurred. He had already started Shasta daisies, but I explained
that they have different blooming time.
I also explained that nearly all of our perennial flowers
come from my backyard and I could probably divide some more for FSCF. In fact, that is how I spent my Thursday
evening, potting quite a few coneflowers, as well as some purple bee balm and
some white garden phlox, etc. But then
I was too tired to email him. I also
explained that we were planning a fence straightening project on Saturday. If it went well, I might have some t-posts
for them. (Most of ours were previously
donated by Lowe’s, grants, Trudeaus’s, etc.)
Daniel relayed to me that Growing Power had closed
six months ago because of its mounting
debts, and my hero Will
Allen’s operation had failed financially.
His famous book, the Good Food Revolution, was required
reading for all OSU freshman just a few years ago. This did not surprise me (considering all of
its operations, staff size and ambitious plans), although it was very
disappointing. When he was here in 2011,
Allen had been pretty candid that it was virtually impossible to turn a profit
in agriculture. He had only succeeded
because he turned his farm into a non-profit (i.e., tax free), and could accept
donations and grants, particularly educational grants to teach young people. The Growing Power website is still there but no
longer has any content. I grew up in
farm country and I don’t know any farmer who doesn’t have a full-time (or
almost full-time) job on the side that pays a salary and subsidizes the
farm. My grandfather worked for Columbus
Southern power, for instance. One of my
best friends from high school actually commutes to Grove City to work full-time
every day to subsidize his farm. The
Wall Street Journal reported in February that even big commercial
farms rent their large trucks out during after the harvest season. While
farming can provide a nice supplemental income, hardly anyone gets rich, let
alone breaks even. It’s very labor
intensive and/or expensive to get land, water and equipment. Only the Amish seemed to be breaking even and
they have large families on small plots of land with, obviously no modern equipment. I think President Trump must finally be
getting the message because last night he mentioned that he plans to protect
and maybe even expand the farmer guest worker program. (Nothing in the past two decades has struck
me as more absurd and counter productive than to criminalize the folks who plant,
pick and process our incredible cheap food for mere pennies per pound).
On Friday, I picked up some lumber and other supplies at
Lowe’s. I needed to cut down the boards
from 8 feet to 6 feet, but my circular saw wouldn’t work. (It turned out not to be the saw, but the ancient
extension cord which was faulty). Luckily, former SACG gardener and long-time
neighbor Mike was out in the alley playing with his youngest child and he has a
table saw that made quick work of my project.
Saturday, we had a group of 7 Community Service volunteers. I baked them some blueberry muffins and Amy
donated boxes of granola bars to keep them energetic. Because
the Columbus half-marathon had taken over downtown, hey reported directly to
the SACG in their own cars. It was
colder than expected and the wind chill didn’t help. Of course, this is pretty typical April
weather, so I was dressed in layers. Several
of the volunteers were not and a couple of them complained about being cold the
entire time. I gave them plenty of
sweaty work to generate body heat, but only a couple of them used it to their
advantage. (One smart lady even stripped
down to just a t-shirt for a while because there was sufficient work to do to
keep warm if you made any effort at all). Two of them spent most of their time picking
up litter in the neighborhood. They hit
a few alleys and Main Street down to Berkeley. They explained that a vacant lot down there can now be mowed due to
their efforts. 
When we have a group of volunteers, I usually have them also
mow not only our lot, but also the neighboring Block Watch lots because I know
our neighbors – like most of us – could make other use of their spare time if
they did not have to mow those lots every week.
However, this week they beat us
to it and apparently had already mowed all of them – including ours -- on
Friday. Those slackers. So, that was one less task for our cold
volunteers to do.
After about an hour, I grabbed the strongest looking
volunteer to help me straighten our southern fence. In particular, he dug three post holes so
that we could upgrade our fence posts from wood stakes and t-posts to treated 2x4s
that had been painted to match our front picket fence. The first one was not so bad, but the others
involved digging out raspberry bushes and a lot more stone debris. It was a messy and time consuming
project. I don’t think that we’ll be
able to return to it until next Fall because the brambles will begin to grow
gangbusters as the temperatures rise and will be less and less able to survive
being dug up and replanted. I had hoped
to get six posts set, but we only accomplished about half of that. We also could not dig quite as deeply as we
needed to, but it will probably be sufficient.
Then, we added top boards to keep the wire fence straight (as opposed to
sagging between posts). Nonetheless, we
then had to saw the tops off of the posts to level them with the fence. 
The northern fence probably sags more, but it does not get
as much traffic as the southern fence (which faces Main Street). In a couple of weeks, the entire fence will
be covered in raspberry brambles and no one will notice anything until we cut them
back again in the Fall. If we get some
more lumber, we could have it painted over the summer and then have the project ready to go
for our final two or three weeks of the year.
I had told them that we would be turning to weeding and
planting a food pantry plot after lunch.
However, the fence project took all of my time. (While the posts were being dug, I managed to
weed and mulch the southeast flower bed).
We also had another visitor who was interested in possibly joining the
Garden, so I gave her and her daughter a tour.
One of the ladies made sure to keep busy and then reloaded the shed with
all of the tools and implements. She
also watered in the brambles that we had replanted.
Carly and Sabrina were there to tend their plots. Sabrina planted onions and potatoes, etc. and
helped Carly while I was busy with our volunteers. I released our volunteers at 2, but told them
that they did not need to leave because I had more work if they wanted to
stay. They jumped into their cars and then I turned to my own plot. However, my post-digger hero (who had two
blisters from his work, one of which I had to bandage) returned to ask if I
needed more help. He didn’t want to
leave me “high and dry.” I laughed; I
could be here 24-7 and still not catch up on everything. Run while you still can! After he left, I weeded one more row in my
plot and planted garlic, beets and leeks.
I also watered in my crops, noticed that my lettuce and spinach had
germinated and retrieved the hose from the tank before calling it a day. 
I went back to the Garden tonight to make sure that Hillary’s
plot was still marked off. (I forgot to
check if the volunteers had moved the stakes where I had marked off the
plots. They had, but had moved them into the plots without me even having to
ask. Good job). Hillary was there with her boyfriend, Jake,
who formerly managed a campus garden in Toronto. (Could he finally be the replacement Garden
Manager I’ve been waiting a decade for?
We shall see). They were busy
digging trenches in her plot. He
explained that they were just going to double dig, but ended up digging out a
couple hundred pounds of construction debris that was still in her plot. They piled it in front of a food pantry
plot. I just laughed and laughed. I had dug out much more than that in my time. She was lucky to have Jake there to help her,
because I was generally dependent upon the kindness of strangers passing by in
the alley. I’m thinking that we might
want to use this new debris to plug the gaps in the chain link fence on the
west side of Sabrina’s plot to make sure that the groundhog does not return. The
smaller pieces could be used as path edging. We had already obtained a grant in
2015 to haul the prior six years’ of construction debris to a dump and it will
be a while before we do that again.
Jake asked about getting some more compost for her plot because he was
not as impressed with our soil as most people.
Sigh. I told them I would be
getting more in a few weeks to a month, but they could grab a couple of the
bagged soil or go down to Ohio Mulch off Fairwood.
Next weekend, I hope to have had new wood chips
delivered. Our volunteers will be spread
new wood chips on our narrower paths, etc.
Hopefully, we will get the rest of the flower beds weeded and
mulched. If not, we have a crew of
United Methodist women coming on May 10.
I have announced that they are going to be weeding and planting all of
the vacant plots (i.e., our food pantry plots).
So, anyone wanting a plot at the SACG had better arrive by this Saturday
to put in their work equity, etc., because we will not have any vacant plots
after May 10. After May 10, will return
to automatic pilot and will be focusing on weeding, watering and harvesting,
etc. and I will be able to focus on my own plot.
No comments:
Post a Comment