This winter was extremely harsh and long. Our entire focus in programing was to bring our guests out from the cold by expanding shelter hours, providing timely life-saving knowledge and outreach to those living outside and networking with our community partners to expand our resources.
With spring and the warmer temperature, it is such a pleasure to getting back to nature and to raise food from our back yard. I am so lucky to have such great volunteers from our guests and the Brandeis Be Our Guests club.
Oswaldo,Luis, Roberto |
Eddie |
Brandeis, Be Our Guests Club |
Preparing the Garden
April 1
April 1
Once the snow all melted and spring showers lessened, Oswaldo and Roberto cleaned out the old growth from the garden. That same week the students and Day Center guests tilled and aerated the soil and pushed the soil to form beds. Since this is our final year, I plan to increase the sizes of certain beds, utilize our green bags and explore lateral growing so we can increase our produce capacity.
Next, we will be sure to add new top soil on the beds before we sow seeds or plant seedling. Since our garden is organic, we won't use any fertilizers so the nutrients that were in the soil were likely to be depleted after last season.
Plantings
April 15
In our area, we have two growing cycles for cold weather plants and 1 cycle for warm weather plants.
Warm
weather-germinate mid-April for mid-May/early June planting outdoors
Plantings
To stretch out the harvest season, we plan to space out the
germination/sowing so the plants will grow and mature at different times. Katie Moran, Oswaldo and I plan to germinate some seeds indoors.
In our area, we have two growing cycles for cold weather plants and 1 cycle for warm weather plants.
They are 2 groups of seeds --
cool weather and warm weather. For the cool weather seeds, we probably
can just sow directly into the soil, as germinating them in-door now won't save us any time at this juncture. We will sow in batches on weekly intervals,
so if the nights got very cold in the next few weeks, we won't lose
everything.
Here is our list of plants, in no apparent order:
Cold weather
plants -germinating indoor now for mid-April planting or sow directly outdoor
mid-April
-Swiss chard (Rainbow, used as
greens)
-Swiss chard (Bright lights)
-Swiss chard (Fordhook)
-spinach (Tyee)
-spinach (America)
-spinach (Bloomsdale long-standing)
-collards
-kale –(red winter)
-kale (Red Russian)
-kale (dwarf blue curled scotch)
-mustard green
-
mustard (Florida broadleaf)
-pai tsai
-broccoli raab (rappini)
-Chinese cabbage
-Chinese kale
-beets (Golden)
-pea shoots
-lettuce (Mesclun)
-lettuce (Black seeded simpson)
-lettuce mix
-lettuce (bowl red)
-lettuce (Bibb)
-arugula
-basil (heirloom)
-basil (sweet)
-basil (Thai Siam Queen)
-basil (Genovese)
-basil (mammouth)
-oregano
-dill
-microgreens
-tomatoes (Gardener’s
Delight/cherry)
-tomatoes (sweetie-cherry)
-tomatoes (VF Hybrid)
-tomatoes (Roma)
-cucumbers(straight eight)
Catherine and I are excited to start our garden and will be posting our progress. We hope you will enjoy bringing nature into your backyard too!
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