I haven’t said much about the Impact Community Garden lately, but I want to report that it is alive and well, and growing along nicely in 2012. And it is high time for an update! This is a garden project I helped start last year at Impact Ministries in Evansville. You can read about how it all came about in this post from 2010.
Impact garden, before 2010 groundbreaking (click on any image to enlarge)
So far this year we’ve had three planting sessions, with the first one being on March 31st when we planted potatoes. We planted the same amount of potatoes this year as we did in 2011 (about 90 hills), but we added some Yukon Golds to the mix along with the Kennebecs and Red Lasoda varieties we grew last year. The potatoes are growing great, and we will be hilling them up soon.
Impact Community Garden in early May, 2012
On April 14th we had our second planting session, and planted lettuce, cabbage, broccoli and onions. We planted a lot more onions than we did in 2011. The Candy variety did very well last year, making large sweet onions, so we decided to grow more of it. And we added the Redwing variety to give us some red ones. The lettuce was a nice mix of red and green leaf varieties like Merlot, New Red Fire, Simpson and Spotted Trout. It should be ready for cutting in a week or so. We planted both the onions and lettuce in double rows.
double row of lettuces
Our third work session was this week, when we planted tomatoes, squashes, chard and green beans. We also did some weeding, and worked on our rabbit fencing around the perimeter of the garden. We’re trying to keep the critters from eating up all our veggies!
Spotted Trout lettuces
We have another work session planned in about two weeks, when we hope to cage our tomatoes and plant sweet potatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplant. We’re going to mulch most of the garden this year using newspaper covered with straw. That should help keep down weeds, as well as conserve moisture. We were fortunate last year to get 60+ inches of rain, but so far this year has been dryer than normal, and mulching should help limit our watering needs a bit.
fall 2011 garden mulched with straw
We’ve got a few new faces (and hands) in the garden this year, including one person who saw the garden last year and stuck a note on the fence and said “I want to be a part of this”. Now that’s what I call a community garden! I’ll be back throughout the season with more news about this exciting project that is helping to teach people how to grow their own food, and learn about gardening.
It looks like things are growing well.
Looking very good and growing nicely.
I just started subscribing to your blog via email, and replied that way instead of using the link to get here. Duh. Great job on the community garden. I’ve only belonged to gardens that had individual plots. Great to see people learning to grow food. It is especially good for children. Interesting story about city kids and carrots. orange County CA has a large garden called Centennial Farm in Costa Mesa that gives tours to school groups. A docent pulled up a carrot and one little girl asked incredulously why they had buried it in the dirt! She had no idea how carrots grew.
Good for you!
I love the note in the fence. Good projects are contagious.
Looking good Dave. You all are going to fill a lot of hungry tummies with the very best food they could eat.
Wonderful project – The note on the fence part of the story is great. All your crops are looking good – I particularly like your spotted trout lettuces. The spotted part of their name I get but the trout?
Forellenschluss is the German name for this Austrian romaine lettuce, and translates to “spotted trout” or “speckled like a trout’. I guess the spots resemble the spots on a trout’s back. As if that wasn’t confusing enough, it is also sometimes sold as “Freckles”.
Whatever you call it, it’s a great tasting lettuce with a mild, buttery taste – not at all like a typical romaine lettuce.