Cold-Weather Squash Scramble
The frost that looked likely did not come to pass, but we took that as a signal to harvest all the winter squash. Gardeners planted fourteen rows of winter squash: buttercup, butternut, and delicata seeds. Some squash plants grow into widely sprawling vines. This is...
What else is growing at the garden?
The Potato and Onion Harvests Are In
For most crops in the Garden at 485 Elm, gardeners harvest whatever's ready to eat. Greens, beans, peas, eggplants, peppers, summer squash, and herbs are harvest as we go. A few crops we harvest all at once then divide by the number of gardener households for...
Garlic harvest day
Every fall, we plant garlic from seed. A garlic seed is one clove of garlic. We harvest the crop the following season just after midsummer. Garlic is the one crop we save seed from for planting the entire next crop. On a perfect July morning, gardeners from sixteen...
The Garden of Eating
Ripe husk cherries, aka ground cherries. These sweet-tart treats are related to tomatoes and grow on low bushy plants. Haricots verts and other bush beans are bursting on the vine. We cleared the vines of mature beans so new ones can grow and brought packed full-size...
The garden is flowers!
The garden is a DIY CSA for gardeners not just for food but for flowers. The Flower Power Team suggests gardeners bring a container, grab scissors from the garden shed, and help themselves to a bouquet. There's bee balm, bachelor's buttons, poppies, and some pinks....
Dealing with Garden Pests: We’re Hosting a Workshop
The Garden at 485 Elm is hosting a workshop in organic-gardening-compatible garden pest management on Wednesday, June 23. Learn more at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont's website. Then Register here. Garden like a farmer! Integrated Pest Management...
Garden task: Harvest and eat garlic scapes
This is the time of the season when we watch the garlic crop for scapes. Scapes are the flowers each growing garlic bulb sends up. Harvesting them keeps the sun, water, and soil nutrients feeding the bulb (our target crop) instead of the beautiful flower that would...
It’s food, beautiful food
Maturity came early to French sorrel, chives, Good King Henry, and a few other perennial and self-seeding plants. Suddenly, the garden is bursting with fresh food. With nearly twenty gardeners' households harvesting crops, how do we share the food? When everyone grows...
A Garden with Good Friends
A gardener here for several years is now a Friend of the Garden. Friends of the Garden join us for work parties or show up to do some weeding and watering without committing to the season. With friends like this . . . we are very fortunate indeed.
Planting Potatoes
Gardeners dug eight trenches and turned compost into the soil. Planting potatoes while prepping new trenches. Gardeners planted seed potatoes in six of the eight trenches—two furrows each of Chieftain, Kennebec, and Superior varieties. If we score more seed, the last...
It begins: First big work party of spring
A beautiful day beckoned gardeners for the first big garden work party of the season. We dug potato trenches (and found some garlic & carrot treasures), planted flowers, prepped beds for onions and squash, turned the compost between bins, and said hi to the worms...
