On a dry, cool, sunny day, the UVM TREK Farm and Food team arrived with open hands and hearts—and a whole lot of skill—and transformed the garden.
Though you’ll usually find the garden’s photo stories in chronological order, here is the TREK team after four hours of intense gardening. They arrived with, sustained, and departed with big, beautiful, joyful energy.
TREKkers dug into and turned over the garden waste windrow, chopping up and turning under months worth of dense plant material. Over the next few months, it will break down into nutrient-rich soil to grow new crops in.
A week ago, this bed was dense with mature potatoes. Gardeners harvested them, leaving a bed that needed its rows redefined and its soil fed.
The TREK team planted cover crop, watered it in, and spread straw to mark the new plantings, prevent moisture evaporation, and suppress weeds.
Special project: Team members gathered slugs and snails from damp beds and relocated them beyond the garden fence, where they’ll have plenty to eat and won’t deplete the garden crops.
Harvesting is quite a garden task this time of year. TREKkers harvested cucumbers (including the yellow lemon cukes, named for their appearance, not their flavor), yellow squash, and zucchini, from dainty to baseball bat.
In Compostville: moving the contents of bin 1 (the Jora tumbler) into bin 2, and so on.
Outside the garden fence, seven boxes grow crops the deer and woodchucks leave alone—rhubarb, horseradish, Egyptian walking onions, lemon balm, and garlic. These “outboxes” might not get all the attention they should, especially when their crops are out of season. On this day, they got all the love. And more slugs and snails were safely relocated.
The final TREK team task of the day was weeding the outboxes. In the coming weeks, gardeners will be wowed by each and every change, every act of garden love, that transformed the garden over half a day in ways that set a course for a successful rest of the season.
