Garlic Scapes: A Delicious Garden Task
The garlic plants are sending out scapes. Our job is to harvest and eat them! If we left the scapes on the garlic plants, they'd grow into beautiful flowers, using up energy. Instead, gardeners snap or snip the entire scape from every plant, freeing up those resources...
What else is growing at the garden?
Sumptuous Garlic & Onion Harvest
Garlic and onions are among the five crops we harvest all at once and divide into shares. Unlike beans, greens, and peas, which continue producing as everyone harvests all they can eat, these crops are one and done. Shares are very generous! We laid out the garlic by...
Bursting with Herbs
Every season, the Garden at 485 Elm gives dozens of pounds of food to local organizations ensuring our neighbors have access to fresh, delicious local food. On a beautiful evening, we harvested basil, oregano, and thyme that went to the Montpelier Food Pantry for...
So Much Green for 4th of July
This gardener is surrounded by beets to the right, mint at lower left, and potatoes in the background. In the lower right, it's impossible to tell this early what flowers are coming up. That row is growing aster, Salpiglossis, snapdragons, Helenium, Heliopsis (false...
It’s Food
Every season, there's prepping, planting, tending, weeding, baby crops, and then suddenly, food. That's where were at. I went out to the garden and saw someone had harvested peas and left them on the picnic table for others to enjoy. I wondered how the peas were...
Digging Flowers to Grow More Flowers
The garden's Flower Ladies strategize what to dig up to make room for planting annuals. Before long, the group was digging away, carefully unearthing what had been spreading in the flower beds. https://youtu.be/Gxt4GG5Zp5Q Gardeners were invited to take home...
All Planted Out
On a perfect cool, cloudy, comfortable day, gardeners worked all day long to get seeds and seedlings into the ground. Bed selection and prep, planting techniques, and camaraderie got the job done. Flower team dug out self-seeding Shasta daisies and ubiquitous...
A Great Start with Great Starts
Here at the Garden at 485 Elm, we acquire starts for some of our crops. At the beautiful Pleasant Mount Farm Greenhouse in Huntington, Vermont, we got our starts for hot-weather plants and herbs. We grow food and flowers to share among the 20 families who tend the...
Planting Trees
Food and flowers aren't all we plant here at the Garden at 485 Elm. The "back 40" is what we call the 7/10 of an acre beyond the garden fence. It had been lawn for over half a century. In 2015, we partnered with Friends of the Winooski River and U.S. Fish &...
Planting Potatoes, Planting Trees
With 16 percent humidity and a few clouds overhead, it was a perfect day to spend hours in the garden. Gardeners dug trenches and planted 30 pounds of seed potatoes. The varieties are Reba, Red Chieftain, and Superior. The weather's beautiful to be out in, but it's...
Planting Alliums: Onions & Shallots
https://youtu.be/O2DTFkZErBA Before planting, gardeners gently turn the soil. Tilling breaks up the soil structure and cuts up the worms who live here and add nutrients to the soil. Using this deep-spader (or maybe a broadfork) preserves soil structure while aerating...
