Sweet and Low

Fall weather has finally arrived to my great delight and the time has finally come to harvest our bumper sweet potato crop and put most of the garden to bed.  However, I am pretty much alone these days at the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden this month since most of the gardeners have thrown in the towel for the season.  No one will do their assigned chores without me putting on my witch hat.  The court unexpectedly has stopped sending up community service volunteers, bringing our fence straightening project to a screeching halt.  Thank goodness for Amy helping me out for a few hours this weekend and being the only gardener who ever helps me to carry the lawn waste bags to the curb every other Monday. 

This was just one of four giant sweet potato patches at the SACG

As readers may recall, I had not planned on starting sweet potato seedlings this year because it has  not been a reliable crop over the years and I was having trouble getting the potatoes to form leaves.   However, quite unexpectedly, one of my sweet potatoes started forming leaves from its eyes without me even having to put the potato in water (which can cause it to form roots before the leaves appear).  So, I had lots and lots of seedlings to provide the SACG gardeners.  All but two of the gardeners grew sweet potatoes this year and their vines literally took over the Garden.   I always recommend that gardeners mark their potato hills with a tall stick where the potatoes are planted because otherwise you will not know where to water.  (The bigger the hill, the bigger the potatoes will get).  Sometimes, the vines will set new roots, but rarely form potatoes at those locations.   My own sweet potatoes did not get a lot of sun this year (being shaded out by our new picket fence, sunflowers, bean trellises and my faster growing regular potatoes, etc.).  However, my vines also grew out into the front flower bed to compensate.

Sabrina cleaned out her plot weeks ago.  She had recently gotten a full-time job (with a two-hour daily commute) and has little time left for the SACG after caring for her family and preparing to move into a new house.  I am sadly resigned that she will unlikely return next year because her new home is just a few blocks from the north Bexley community garden and she will have her own back yard available to grow her own food and flowers.   As she cleaned out her plot, and tried to stay ahead of the pesky groundhog coming from next door, she had a bumper crop of sweet potatoes.  She gave me one and a couple to my visiting friend, Paul and his wife.   Two weeks ago, Alyssa and Carly started cleaning out their plots.  Carly only planted one hill of potatoes, but had about 5 pounds of potatoes.  She was disappointed because she had 20 sf of vines.  Alyssa had a bumper crop and decided to postpone digging up the rest of them so that they could continue to get bigger.  It is important to dig them up before the first frost because, according to conventional wisdom, a dead vine damages the potato so that it does not keep as long as earlier harvested potatoes.  (Sweet potatoes will keep in a root cellar for a year or more).   

I started on the ones planted in the food pantry plot when the UMC Women visited the SACG on May 17.  I think that they planted between 6-8 hills of potatoes.  I knew the ones to the south would do better because the northern hills were shaded by sunflowers and bean trellises.  I was not wrong.  It took me hours and hours to dig all of them up.  Some one of them had even grown into and under the wood chip path.   They had even formed potatoes where they  had started new roots, but I dug them up before they had gotten very big.  (The small ones will still make great steak fries and will be easier to chop at that small size).   All in all, I harvested more than 30 pounds of sweet potatoes from just those few hills.   Crazy.   I then harvested the potatoes from 4 hills that I planted.  Two of them were worthless because they received virtually no sun.  But, I harvested more than 6 pounds of potatoes from just two hills.  That will last me all year;-)   It took me a dozen trips to the compost bins to dispose of all of the potato vines.  

Sabrina is not the only gardener we will be losing.  Marcel cleaned out most of her plot a few weeks ago and has not been able to see the beautiful cosmos that are currently blooming in her plot.  She has always wanted to start her own community garden.  She only joined us back in 2014 because Seth convinced her that she should try gardening with another garden before starting her own.  She gardened with us two years and took a year or two off when she had her last baby and returned this year to take the large plot next to mine.   However, it has always been inconvenient because she does not have her own car and has to transfer COTA buses to get here from her apartment.  Her husband has usually dropped her off and picked up her and Zion this year, but he is not a gardener and generally does not stick around.   In past years, I sometimes drove her home when I left on  Saturdays, but that required her to wait around on me to leave, which I am sure was very tedious.   So, now she has gotten her own Land Bank lot closer to her apartment and has already had her com-til delivered there.  She does not, however, have tools or a rototiller and we chatted about how to best prepare the lot now for planting in the Spring.  She also wants her own strawberry patch, so I told her to return in the early Spring when we thin our strawberry patch, so that I could give her some seedlings. 

Carly and I had a throw down about mowing the lawn, which has been her chore for September and October.  I do not expect to see her return.  The Community Service volunteers had been mowing when they came, but they cancelled the last weekend in September and then did not come during the Columbus Day holiday weekend.  When I did not hear from Brenda on Friday morning, I texted to see if everything was ok.  When I did not receive a response, I called and reached Leigh Anne who gave me the bad news that we would not have any more CS volunteers this year.  The pilot program (where CS volunteers were helping area community gardens like the SACG and Four Seasons City Farm) had been terminated and absorbed into the regular probation department.  Neither the SACG nor FSCF are approved non-profits with the regular probation department.  Leigh Anne sent me an application for the regular probation department, but this means that we will not be able to complete our fence project (with $200 in lumber and paint subsidized by the City’s Land Bank program and our own limited funds) to straighten our wire fence. 

As some readers may know, the City of Bexley opened a new community garden in April in north Bexley next to its new police station.  It is stunning and rivals the Conservatory’s community garden campus in jaw-dropping amenities.  While they have an amazingly beautiful and giant shed, a shade arbor, benches, water hydrants, gravel paths, short and tall raised beds, they have really horrible soil.  (Of all of the things to scrimp on, soil was the last thing that should have been skimped).  When I stopped by in July, the SACG plants were lush, but not at the new BCG where nothing looked to be more than two feet high.  That being said, I am a huge fan of its fence.  Most everything at the SACG was donated or paid with grant funds and we have slowly improved it each year for the past 10 years.  Bexley did this almost overnight.   And then, can you believe it, they will not rent me a plot.   Plots of between 100 sf and 400 sf are $10 each at the SACG, but 150 sf at the BCG are $40 each.  Most shocking of all, there are no compost bins at the BCG.  WTF?

We were not planning on any capital improvement projects this year at the SACG after completing our front picket fence last year.  But, the MOFB grant enabled us to have running water installed.  And then, with the City Land Bank subsidy, I decided to replace our leaning metal fence posts with more stable 2x4s and to install wood braces along the top of the fence to keep it from sagging and leaning over the winter when the brambles have been cut back to expose the naked wire fence.   While I love our wire fence (which was donated by Home Depot in 2009) and it doubles as a berry trellis and lets lots of light into the Garden, it sags in places and leans.  Not the most attractive sight in the neighborhood over the winter.  I wanted something neater looking, like at the new Bexley Community Garden.

We started the project in the Spring with our new CS volunteers and added to it in August after the water lines were installed, but the brambles soon grew too tall and we had to wait until this time of the year when we start pruning them back.   In the meantime, we painted a lot of the lumber to match our arbor and picket fence with the OSU and CS volunteers.   We barely have enough gardeners to get the Garden put to bed for the winter (which entails cleaning out the plots and pruning the berries back inside and outside the fence, bagging the brambles, etc.), so adding a capital improvement project is infeasible.  I’m lucky when anyone shows up to help clean out the Garden, so I cannot count on having enough volunteers to also dig fence posts holes and hold the braces steady while I attach them to the posts).   We still have a lot of lumber left to paint (and had planned to do so with the J&J volunteers that cancelled on us after I bought the paint), but it has gotten too cold to do so now.   Hopefully, we will have a large group volunteer to help us next Spring (or a few volunteers each week for a month at the beginning of the 2019 growing season).   You know what they say about best laid plans. . . .  . .  

I’ve been beyond frustrated that no one is doing their chores this month without my throwing a temper tantrum.  It is emotionally exhausting because I try not to get angry on a regular basis.   You’d think that I don’t send gentle reminders at the beginning of each month or post the chore chart in the shed for everyone to see when they grab tools.  You’d think that I had not first given the gardeners the option of opting out of particular months or chores before the assignments are made in May/June.   You’d think that I don’t already spend 4-6 hours at the Garden every Saturday and another 2-3 every Wednesday evening until early September.  You’d think that I hadn’t already made available for only $10/year all of the seeds, water, compost, tools, tomato cages and trellises, seedlings, tutoring, etc. that they could need.   You’d think that I don’t have any interest in having my own social life, alternative exercise options or activities.   You would think that the gardeners are illiterate or lack access to computers or cell phones or college degrees. You would think that the chores are so onerous that it would require the gardeners to spend more than 30 minutes extra at the Garden when they have a chore to perform. You would think that the youngsters would offer to help Amy and I -- the two oldest gardeners -- carry the lawn waste bags to the curb or help with any other extra work when they are there.   But you would be wrong. It only takes 15-20 minutes to mow the lawn and only watering/weeding the food pantry/neighbor plots is likely to take more than 30 minutes, depending on the time of year.

When I have to threaten to change the locks to get someone to do the simple chore that they agreed to perform when they signed up for a plot, it’s time for me to throw in the towel.  I feel bad because we just got an expensive water system.   I’ve wondered if Parks & Recreation would like to take over the SACG.   (Bexley’s Park & Recreation Department manages its community gardens).  I suspect that Amy and I would be the only returning gardeners.  But then, I remembered that Fairwood Commons will be opening soon and its residents may want to garden with us.  They will only have to walk one block, so they are unlikely to complain about the inconvenience of chores.   So, I have decided to give it one more year to see if the Fairwood Commons residents change the dynamic I have had with our new, younger gardeners in the past year or so.  But if things don’t change, I will be blogging about transferring the Garden or shutting it down completely this time next year.  

Speaking of our running water (which we are not going to need this year for obvious reasons), our plumber, Tom, from Rain One came by this week and provided seriously heavy-duty chains to keep them shut when no one is there.  Those are seriously thick chains. 

We still have lots of flowers in bloom: begonias, asters, cosmos, zinnias, petunias and African marigolds.  Our bees and butterflies are still visiting in significant numbers.  However, I think that we will have our first frost on Saturday night, so most of these will get cleaned out this weekend or next weekend.   (Jym is even predicting the possibility of snow flurries on Saturday night, so a frost seems pretty likely).   I brought my own houseplants in last week.  I am even in the process of trying, for the first time, to revive a poinsettia from last year that I kept alive over the summer.  I am curious to see if I can get the leaves to turn red by using timed lights instead of keeping it with the rest of my houseplants upstairs. 

Aside from harvesting our sweet potato crop, I also found more volunteer potatoes from the ones that Stan started a few years ago (and we never seem to harvest them all, hence all of the volunteer potatoes that we get year after year).  Amy spent a couple of hours helping to harvest our remaining pole beans and chopping down and bagging corn stalks.  I finished that project and raked out three or four of the food pantry plots, weeded a bit, cleaned out tomato plants from my plot, harvested the rest of the basil and most of the eggplants, thinned the turnips, and then conducted our weekly food pantry harvest until my arms felt like rubber.  I drove everything down to Faith Mission and then went home and did more of the same work in my own back yard while listening to the last 10 minutes of the OSU-Minnesota game.   This weekend, I will be working on cutting back and bagging the raspberry bushes on the south fence (and in my plot), removing the rest of the eggplants and tomato plants, removing the zinnia forest from my plot and disconnecting the tall rain tank.  Volunteers are always welcome and, if you give me advance notice, I’ll bring refreshments that we had planned to provide our CS volunteers before that program was unexpectedly cancelled.