Peas, please

Yup, they're doing it. The peas are finally sprouting. Kate and I were starting to wonder if the free pea seeds she got were a bad batch. After talking to a local garden guru about it, Kate discovered that the soil temperature hadn't been quite warm enough for the peas to sprout. Sure enough. Three warm days later they started poking through the soil.

I planted some gaillardia and zinnias around the edges of the pea tee-pee. Hopefully they will sprout faster than the peas did.

Along with the warmer weather we've been getting some rain. Silly me for thinking that it was enough to keep the willows happy. One of those water loving trees almost dried out and died on me, but it looks like it is reviving. Kate is getting some high school kids together to dig the other trench for the second row of willow trees. Sam will plant them, and when the trees grow tall enough, they will be woven together to form a tunnel. Pretty cool, huh?

News of the butterfly garden, you ask? Not much. The three main volunteers involved with the butterfly garden (myself, Tiffany and Holly) have been wiped out with our personal lives the past couple of weeks. I did get a volunteer named Steve to move the rest of our donated compost from the community garden over to the butterfly garden area using the high school's tractor. Thank you Steve! We just need to find/make time to spread it all out, layer it with newspaper, and then mix clean compost with top soil. THEN we'll finally be able to get plants in the ground.

Maybe you're wondering why I don't just say we'll use the community garden compost mixed with the top soil, and avoid all the hassle of doing two layers. Well, as I found out from the raised planting beds, the community garden compost has collected a lot of seeds. We have mystery plants popping up all over the place in the three beds that have the compost. One of the beds has a couple dozen little pumpkin/gourd/melon plants sprouting on me. I'm voting for the gourd as I recall finding some large gourd pieces while spreading the compost in that particular bed.

Speaking of the raised beds, looks like two of the tomato plants will survive. The basil that I thought was toast is actually coming back! Peppers were not one of the survivors, however. The only thing that remains of those are the labels stuck in the ground like headstones. The chive (or was it scallion?) seeds the Dylan and Penelope planted are sprouting like crazy. I thinned them out somewhat, but will have to go back for another round.

As the weather FINALLY seems to be settling into its regularly scheduled warmth, we'll have to try for a take three on planting the raised beds, and a first try with the butterfly garden.

Ta ta for now!

Rachel

Freeze...

Friday and Saturday nights had frost advisories issued by the National Weather Service. Saturday morning I checked on the plants, and they were doing great! No damage at all. Sunday afternoon I checked on them and found that pretty much everything had succumbed during the night. :( The adjoining community garden had similar issues. Everyone knew the cold weather was coming and prepared their plants as best they could, to no avail. Word in the garden is that it got down to 28 degrees last night. To me, that is a bit more like a freeze rather than a frost. The lone survivors in our beds seem to be a cinnamon basil, and the two squash. One of the tomatoes *might* make it, but it will probably take a while to recover from the damage. We are probably just going to put it out of its misery instead.

The sunflowers seem to be made of much hardier stock, as they seemed completely unfazed by the chilly weather. They do need to be thinned out a bit.

Still no signs of sprouting from the beans. Good thing considering the weather.

So, I promised photos of the boulders and here I deliver. They don't look like much in the photo, but the large one on the left is actually about 5' tall. I'll try to take overview photos from this same spot

every so often, so that we can look back and see how much has changed. Hopefully one of the things that will change are those blackberry brambles along the fence. They desperately need to be pruned back... Another job for another day.

Rachel

Frost?!

Turns out the girl scouts didn't have time to completely fill the last two raised beds. So, I joined my friends Michele and Holly there on Thursday to top them off. It was really nice to be able to get some exercise and adult conversation at the same time. All of us have kids around the same age, so while we were shoveling and talking, the kids were roaming the property. They made beds in the tall grass, slid down the hillside, played chase, and pretended they were princesses and monsters... among other things I'm sure. The sword-fights with the kiddie rakes we did put a stop to. After mostly filling the beds with compost, we screened some fill dirt and topped the beds with it. Around then the kids started complaining about being hungry, and we realized that it was dinnertime already! We'll lightly mix the dirt and compost together at a later date.

We had another pledge to donate $100!! A big thanks goes out to David and Li Collier! Like I said before, if anyone would like to match that, we'll take what we can get. Checks can be made out to The Siskiyou Arboretum, with a note to earmark the money for the children's garden. Mail them to PO Box 36, Yreka, CA 96097. Thanks again David and Li!

All day today I had been noticing how chilly it has been. Didn't even get up into the 50s. When I finally got around to checking to see what the low would be tonight, I found that we have a frost advisory both tonight and tomorrow night. We still have the row covers for the raised beds at the garden, so I drove on down there and covered both rows again. Hopefully it will be enough. All of the community garden beds that had frost sensitive plants had been covered up with whatever people could find... cardboard, empty pots, and plastic. Someone's bed had tomatoes and peppers that weren't covered, so I scrounged around and found some empty pots to put over them. Keep your fingers crosses that we don't lose any more plants!

There is a garden clean-up day on Sunday at 1pm if you're interested in helping out. Bring gloves, trash bags, and a truck if you have one. See you there!

Rachel

Girl Scouts and Donations!

Well, I was wrong. That wasn't all for today.

It turns out that the girl scouts did show up, they were just running late. Luckily Tiffany waited longer than I did and was still there. They replaced the two half-dead tomatoes and put compost and dirt in the two remaining beds. I'm not sure if they got around to actually planting anything in the new beds though. They also took home plants to start their own gardens at home. Thank you Peggy for moving all that compost for us!

While we were mucking around with the boulders on Sunday, Sam was planting willows for what will eventually be a willow tunnel. In between planting he helped us manhandle the boulders into place. Check out the photo, you can see the start of the bean pole teepee in the background.

Speaking of photos, thank you to Tiffany for taking all of these wonderful photos and then not complaining when I posted them here without asking your permission!

On the donation side of the house, we have to say some additional "Thanks!" to some people. Jerry and Val Jereb have pledged $100 towards the cost of butterfly garden plants. Anyone else who would like to match that, you're more than welcome to do so! :)

A huge thanks needs to go out to Scott Valley Bank. They have offered to let us take over one month of their radio ads!! That is amazing for them to offer that. Stay tuned to find out when those ads will be running.

Rachel

Boulder photos!

Boulder photos are here! You all can see how many thousands of pounds of boulders we moved on Sunday morning now. Look how huge the loader we borrowed was. That greenhouse is NOT a small greenhouse, either. It was so huge that we were worried it might be illegal to drive it on the road. Luckily, we have a couple of CHP friends that got together and looked through their reference books to make sure we were okay "roading" it. They even called around to other people to confirm that it was legal. Thanks Josh and Byron!

We were so beat after finally getting the boulders in place that we didn't think to take a photo.

I'll try to remember to do that the next time I'm at the garden. This photo is of the largest boulder of the bunch, right before we rolled it out of the loader and into place. See those plants that are stuck underneath the boulder? Guess what those are. If you guessed poison oak, you are correct! Ding ding ding ding!!! We scrubbed ourselves down with a poison oak soap after handling that one. Luckily, it look like we all avoided getting a rash from it. I rinsed the boulder down yesterday, but I'm probably going to get some soap and a scrub brush on it too. Wouldn't be good to have kids climbing on it and then coming down with poison oak.

We have four raised beds for this year's spaghetti garden. The first bed Tiffany and her husband, Jonathan, filled with screened dirt and some sort of organic compost/soil from Phoenix Organics. The second bed they filled with half screened dirt, and half screened compost from the community garden. Some girl scouts planted tomatoes in the Phoenix bed, and basil, peppers and squash in the second. Since they were freshly transplanted from the greenhouse, and because it was still getting cold at night, we put row covers over them. Of course, the weather got hot (70 is hot compared to what we are used to) right after we did that. Tiffany watered the first couple of days, and I started on the third day. When I showed up on that 80 degree day, the poor tomatoes were roasting. Only one tomato hadn't wilted. The Phoenix soil had dried out like you wouldn't believe. The bed with the community garden compost was doing just fine. It is pretty interesting the difference between the two. I decided to leave off the row covers to keep them a little cooler, and just take the risk of them getting sunburned. By that evening all but two tomatoes had mostly recovered. So far the only plants that have gotten burned are the basil.

Yesterday, more girl scouts were supposed to show up to add soil and compost to the remaining two beds, and plant them. Unfortunately for Tiffany, they were a no-show. :( Instead of waiting another week for more kids to (maybe) show up, we're probably just going to go ahead and do it. Our growing season is too short to wait.

In other news, the sunflower seeds, for the sunflower house, are starting to sprout already! On Sunday while I was watering, I noticed that some of the seeds had floated up to the top of the soil. When I was poking them back down I saw that a couple had started to sprout. Yesterday even more of them were coming up.

The bean teepee had something sprouting, but as I am bad at plant identification, it could have been a weed for all I know. I think I'm going to get some gaillardia seeds and plant them around the teepee, too. There is extra space since the rototiller we used is 30" wide, and gaillardia are also very attractive to butterflies. They are also in the sunflower family, so it might help tie the different elements of the garden together.

That's all for today!

Rachel

We're online!

Well, the step has been taken. We are officially online! After looking into a few options, I opted to take the (free) plunge and start a blog instead of a full blown website.

The children's garden is a project of the non-profit Siskiyou Gardens, Parks and Greenways Association. I somehow became fully involved in it after getting a plot in the adjoining Community Garden. My big project has been the butterfly garden.

This weekend my husband, Tiffany and I borrowed a loader from Eddie Steinhoff (THANKS EDDIE!!) and managed to move about eight boulders to the garden. One is absolutely huge, one is large, and the rest were small enough that three of us (thanks Sam!) could roll them off of the trailer (thanks Mo!).

Next step is to get the soil amended, then we can finally get to the fun part of planting all of our lovely butterfly friendly plants. Hrm... maybe we can get a grant from some group that is promoting habitat for butterflies. Something to look into.

Rachel