Closing With Another Cold November

Last week, the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden closed for the season and perhaps permanently.   It was, again, very cold, but it’s always heartwarming when we have a number of true volunteers come to put everything away for the season.

At the beginning of the month, Amy came and we had four community service volunteers from the County Environmental Court who helped us to prune back our raspberry bushes, pick up litter in the neighborhood, empty the rain cisterns, clean out annual flowers from the flower bed, harvest radishes, turnips and swiss chard for our weekly donation (which went to the Good Samaritan produce giveaway at Fairwood Elementary School just a couple blocks away), clean out the rest of the cherry tomatoes and vines, clean out abandoned garden plots (thanks Paul and MacKenzie), clean up the corner native flower bed, and mow our lot, the orchard lot and the Block Watch lot across the street, etc.

After that, I painted the metal flower garden art to tidy it up and Charlie emptied and stored the rain barrel, cleaned out even more garden beds, and helped me to fix the front gate.





On our closing day, we had a small army.  In addition to two court community service volunteers, Amy, Whitney, John and Ethan came to help to take down and store the signs (and other supplies that I had been storing at home), wrap up and store the hose, tidy up and organize the shed, stack the tomato cages and stakes, stack, roll and store the trellises, paint the front gate, rake out garden beds, clean out the neighbor bed, harvest radishes, turnips, rosemary, sage, kale, swiss chard, lettuce and beets to take to Faith Mission, clean up and straighten the alley curb, empty our trash can, transport our extra fence pickets from the UC shed to our shed, etc.

I brought hot spiced apple cider (i.e., apple pie in a mug) and no-bake chocolate-peanut butter cookies and Amy brought chocolate-pumpkin bread to keep up our blood sugar.  The other environmental court volunteers were picking up abandoned tires.

Not surprisingly, John was our Volunteer of the Year for 2019 because he came so many weekends to do extra work until it became oppressively hot and humid.  Amy remains our tidiest gardener.  While John kept an extremely tidy plot, he also did not grow as much as she did.

This was the third really cold closing day in a row.  If I were sticking around another season, we would definitely be closing by Halloween next year because it is too cold to be gardening when the high temperature is 35 degrees.  

I have attached our year-end charts showing our food pantry donation results, as well as two charts showing how the donations were made over the past decade. 

The Board is speaking with a couple of OSU college students that are interested in taking over our food pantry donation program and Whitney has a friend that may be interested in taking over, too.   So, we are still trying to figure out whether there will be another planting season.  The OSU students did not show up for our closing day because it was too cold for them . . . . I hope that they do better when it gets really hot and humid.


Meanwhile, I was able to get my cold frame re-  assembled at home and it is protecting my kale, cabbage, lettuce and spinach from the polar plunge. Kale is always sweeter after a good freeze and frost.  

The SACG is not the only long-time community garden in this situation.  The Columbus Dispatch reported last week that the City had purchased the New Harvest Cafe in Linden, which means that the Alma Vera Community Garden has closed.  St. Vincent dePaul's long-time award winning garden that is even older than the SACG is also closing while the Center is demolished and enlargened on the Garden's site.  While Marge is hoping that part of the garden will be resurrected some day, she is not certain and is searching how to distribute their assets (like the greenhouse).  Franklinton Farms is also searching for a new Executive Director because, like me, Nick is departing at the end of this year.   Change is the only constant in life.