Grow And Share

Well, things at the Bunn Sharing Garden are popping!  The flowers on the tomatoes and tomatillos have made way for tomatoes hanging on the plants.  We're hopeful tomatillos will soon follow. 

Tomatoes hanging despite the Colorado Potato Beetles that attacked!  We attacked back today with some Bonide chemicals (one of the better, hopefully less toxic ones) and hand-removal of the larva from the plants.

We also saw some flowers coming up on the Hatch's chile peppers.

Okra, cucumbers, watermelons, peas (many rows), beans (several types), cantaloupe, squash, and more are growing taller and taller in the garden.  We put some good fertilizer on the 2 acres today; a suggested 10-10-10 plus extra minerals including iron.

Mr. Groundhog continues snacking on plants, but a small percentage have been harmed... and the good news is that the plants he nibbled are growing new leaves.  We're hopeful that many of them will recover.

So.... anyway, with tomatoes on the plants and flowers spreading, we are hopeful we are on track to start giving food away (free to all comers and food banks) by the middle of June.

Last weekend, we planted the two acre Bunn community Sharing Garden.  Everything grown in this garden will be given away to local families and local food distribution centers.

We planted the tomatillos, tomatoes, and Hatch's chile pepper plants that were left over from the Garden Plant Giveaway (an event through which we provided local gardeners with free plants so that they could grow food to give away too).

Then, Frankie spent 3 days planting seeds for radishes, turnips, beets, carrots, cucumbers, cantaloupes, peppers, beans, lima beans, peas, and more.  With a few hours of help from Jan A., he planted about 36 rows of seeds!  Not bad for a city boy. :-)

Yesterday (Friday), we stopped by to check things out, like we to pretty much every day.  We had a lot of rain this week, and we have been watching to ensure things didn't get washed away.  All held like a charm, and very little soil movig was needed to cover exposed seeds or plants.

We actually got excited when we saw that the beans were popping through the surface... I'll try to post the picture I took of the 2 inch high bean we found in one row.  I guess the rain on and off since last Saturday gave the seeds a good drink and got them growing.

The turnips are also coming up in droves!  I have a picture of that as well and will try to post here.  There are many, many little turnips all along the row.  We did a full, 200 foot row of turnips, I think.  (I better check with Frank, as he was on that seed duty while I was planting some of the garden plants.)

Anyway, all is going well.  Hopefully we are on track to start harvesting and giving away food by the beginning of June.

A local news channel -- WRAL-TV -- came out to talk with us about what we are doing with Sharing Gardens -- getting more local food available in the community and getting more people growing larger gardens.

We gave the reporter, Stacy Davis, the Local Harvest website as one of our favorite resources.  So, she included a localharvest.org link on their channel's website!

The story and link are here -- http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/5053449/