Garden Sprouts

In less than a week, the garden has really taken off. The following items planted from seed on Sunday, April 20, have already broken ground: pumpkins, cucumbers, radishes, and green beans!

When planting from seed, it's important to transplant the baby seedlings in order to grow a healthy size veggie; failure to do so will result in stunted growth! The photos snapped below were taken before we got our hands dirty with the transplanting!


Cucumbers!


Pumpkins!


Radishes!


Since we created a raised bed planter, we added steps from one course of cinder blocks, filling the cores of each with dirt topped off by gravel. For decorative ambience, we added to stained glass stepping stones with garden themes that we had. Since the space leading into the garden was very small, we removed the grass adding in the pea gravel -- don't you just love to hear the crunch of pea gravel when you walk on it!



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Community Garden

I've gotten involved with a community garden. It's a new garden that rose up from an old parking lot. We can keep anything we grow, but are asked to donate any surplus to the Food Pantry. They help people in need and 30% of their customers are diabetic and in great need of affordable nutritious foods. Most of our garden harvest will go to the pantry. It's very rewarding to work on this project!

Being a community garden, we're meeting some really neat people from diverse backgrounds. From girl scouts to retirees, engineers to firemen, computer geeks to school teachers, we're an eclectic group! And we're having so much fun learning from and getting to know each other!

This week, we're preparing for our grand opening Saturday. We'll have a ribbon cutting, refreshments, lots of balloons, and a whole lot of fun! Our arbor was just built, as you can see from the photo below, after that photo was taken, we've added a lot of pretty potted plants. Last nite was really cool...almost all the gardeners were there, setting up, planting trees and flowers, working in their gardens. High enthusiasm among this group!


Gary prepares the soil, creating a planting area from the old parking lot.


Our new Arbor!




I'm usually behind the lens, so Al got me when I didn't know he had a camera!