August 2012 Vol.
#1, Issue #3
Well, our collective harvest this year has passed 3000
pounds!! Many thanks to all of you who
are a part of this project – for the community you’ve created, as well as the
community you are serving. In this
issue of the newsletter, we’re asking you to set aside a Saturday morning in
September to help keep our greenhouse project on schedule, as well as make a
decision on how we handle the “gleaning” of crops ready for harvest.
Crop Report: Year-to-date, we have logged over 3000 pounds
of produce harvested, with over 2700 of this donated to Lakes FISH, Steilacoom
and Thurston County food banks. This is
800 pounds more than we did last year at the same period!! See chart below for cumulative harvest
report. Now is the right time to plant a
fall crop, or over-wintering crop – garlic, carrots, leeks, kale are all hardy
enough to over-winter.
New greenhouse
construction: the framing of the
four walls and roof trusses was completed this week. Watch a 30-second time-lapse video of a
month’s worth of work here http://youtu.be/U1Y0GYXjO6o . Next steps are to roll out the weed barrier
on the ground, and construct and fill the ten raised-beds. We need many hands to do this work – please save the date of
September 22nd for a morning of assembling wood frames,
heating and irrigation lines, as well as shoveling and spreading lots of
topsoil in the beds.
Please make a
gleaning choice for your plot: for most gardeners, keeping on top of your
harvests throughout the entire season is a challenge – especially during
vacations, or in August when two days’ growth can turn a perfect squash into a
giant torpedo, or tomatoes drop and split.
This year we are instituting a policy where gardeners who see crops in
other beds that are overdue for harvest, can do so before it goes too far
past. If you pick something from
another bed for the donation cooler, be absolutely sure you’ve recorded the
harvest tag completely, so that plot and plot-owner’s yield is accurate. If you know you’ll be away from the garden
and want someone specifically to glean your harvest-ready crop, put your
name/plot# on the sign-up sheet (in the tool-shed and by the scale in the
greenhouse). You can also opt-out of this
gleaning policy – if it’s not okay with you to have your
harvest-ready produce gleaned, you can put a “DO NOT GLEAN” stake in your
plot. These red stakes are located on
the table in the shed as well as by the scale in the greenhouse.
At-home volunteer
needed: we bid a sad but grateful goodbye to Carmen
and John P., who are being re-posted to Texas next month. In addition to their gardening, Carmen
maintained regular updates to the IDCG Facebook page and Blogspot. We need a volunteer willing to add a couple
of posts per month, so that our public web-presence is up-to-date. Please contact Stu if you are willing to do
this.
Saving work for
food-bank volunteers and deliverers:
How you bag and tag your produce donations really matters to the IDCG
gardeners who make the deliveries to the food banks, as well as to the food
bank employees. We have bagged, tagged
and boxed over 800 separate harvests, and some of you use a lot of tape on the
tags. A one-inch strip on the top is
all that is needed, and makes it easier to remove. Also, please do not put a double-knot in the
bag when it goes into the cooler; the food bank volunteers wear latex gloves,
and it saves time if you don’t use a double-knot. A special thanks to Holly Wickenhagen, TJ
Bolen, Dennis Clarke, Stephanie Gonzalez, and Kristin Paul for making our
Lakewood FISH deliveries this summer.
Happy
Gardening!! Save the morning of
September 22 for a work event, and email Stu if you can take over the IDCG
Facebook page and Blogspot.
