New Year and New Leadership

With a new decade comes new leadership at the Stoddart Avenue  Community Garden.  Your recently retired Garden Manager is making one last post to thank you for assisting and contributing to the success of Stoddart Avenue Community Garden.  Community gardening is often exhausting, frustrating and relentless because it always involves a lot of work and challenges. We could not have accomplished all that we did without your generous support. As we start to prepare for the 2020 season, we wanted to share some of our great memories over last summer.

April saw us break ground for our 11^th growing season on an unseasonably warm day with amazing assistance from OSU’s First Year Leadership Initiative.  We spread your wood chips on our paths and around the fence lines, straightened the front gate trellis, straightened our platform raised beds, picked up neighborhood litter, and made more progress on the south side of the Garden with our fence straightening project.     Ken Turner, a former Board member, completely refurbished one of our old and rotting benches.  (Hint hint:  we still have one other bench which needs similar TLC so that we can sit on it again). 

For our annual Earth Day celebration the following week, we planted a honeycrisp apple tree (to go with our McIntosh, Jonathon and Granny Smith trees planted last Fall). Our Stoddart/East Main corner looked cheery with bulbs planted in December which had been donated by Strader’s Garden Centers and distributed at the December GCGC holiday party meeting at the Conservatory.   We also weeded, transplanted, replenished potting soil in the platform raised beds, spread mulch donated by Ohio Mulch and Keep Columbus Beautiful, painted our rain barrel, tidied the strawberry patch, made progress on the northern side of the Garden for our fence straightening project, spread compost, planted grass, and prepared garden beds. 

In June, the Franklin County Municipal Court began again sending us community service volunteers, who helped pick up neighborhood litter, mow the lawns around the Garden, pick cherries, berries, and tomatoes for our weekly food pantry donations, edge flower beds, weed and water food pantry plots and tidy up our alley.  These court-ordered volunteers came almost every week for the rest of the season, and even helped a little at the nearby north Bexley Community Garden.  (Money can buy beautiful landscaping, but skilled hands are still needed).    

In June, we also had help from neighborhood children and visiting volunteers at Urban Connections’ annual summer day camp who came twice that week to help us pick cherries and berries to donate to the Salvation Army on East Main Street.  This year, Urban Connections received a Neighborhood Partnership grant from the Columbus Foundation and the United Way of Central Ohio to work with the SACG on their camp theme of Growing Together in Christ, which included lessons on planting, harvesting and water at the SACG, despite the rainy weather.  We had a bumper crop this year of tart pie cherries, so we needed all of the help we could get.

As you may recall, it pretty much stopped raining at the end of July.  Lucky for us, the Mid-Ohio Food Bank paid for two water hydrants to be installed at the Garden last summer.   The City generously fills our rain cisterns once a year and did so again this year at the beginning of August, but that water was gone in a flash. Sadly, the abnormally dry summer was not our only challenge.  Groundhogs returned to the Garden to eat our heirloom tomatoes, kale and particularly sweet potato vines.  Last year, we harvested around 40  pounds of sweet potatoes, but this year only 5 pounds.  Sigh.  And, because our next door neighbor did not garden this year, the local thieves climbed our fence, broke our front gate and stole our produce instead, including most of our cabbage and vandalized most of the kale that the groundhogs had not eaten.  I cannot blame the four-legged or two-legged varmits, though, for the complete failure of our winter squash crop.  I remain mystified.  But, we had a bumper melon and grape crop to compensate.

OSU and Capital students came in August and September, respectively, to help us plant our Fall crops of beets, turnips, lettuce and radishes.  Although the Capital students were mostly rained out, the OSU students helped us to water, weed, harvest, mow, picked up litter and reorganized our shed.  

OSU students returned at the end of October (after our first frost) to help tear down the Garden, cut back and bag the dead corn and bean stalks and tomato vines, stack the tomato cages and trellises, prune raspberry brambles, harvest our pathetic sweet potato crop, clean out the neighbor and melon beds, mow, etc.

It was again freakishly cold for our closing day in November, but we had a great turnout and got everything cleaned up and put away for the winter.

As you know, I am retiring from the Garden after 11 years, but am being succeeded by long-time Board member and multiple-year Volunteer of the Year, Sabrina Reynolds-Wing.   So, like many things, the Garden leadership is passing from Gen X to Millenials.  I appreciate everyone’s support over the years and expect you to continue supporting Sabrina as she leads us into another decade.  We could have not gotten to this point without her.

 We are only able to overcome our various challenges because of the generosity, well wishes and material support from generous folks like you.   Thanks again and feel free to stop by and mock us while we work.