Hi all:
Two great opportunities for new members/volunteers! Help us get free plants from the BBG over the next two weeks. (We’ve gotten great plants through these give-aways in past years!) Look at the details below and reply below or email cvearthlab@gmail.com if you can help!
Annual Plant GiveawayTuesday, May 6 Recycled Tulip Bulb Giveaway |
The felt plant pockets hung along the fence contain petunias which we hope will take hold and provide us with a welcome splash of color all summer long.
Please dead-head them as needed (that means pull off the dead flowers and not something out of a zombie movie) and water if they’re dry. The felt pockets are in full sun and dry out quickly so they’ll most likely need daily watering.
To water: soak the soil inside the pocket until water runs out the bottom, then wet the outside of the pocket, too.
The petunias thank you.
Remember way back in March when we planted seedlings in the community room? The time to transplant is May 4th from 3-5pm!
While we’re at it, we’re calling the weekend of Saturday, May 3rd and Sunday May 4th, our CV Play Area MulchFest: it’s time to bring in new mulch for the new season. *See UPDATE At Bottom of Post* Whether you want to become a member our garden (which requires you to bring in 2-3 bags of mulch) or you’re simply a family that enjoys (or plans to enjoy) our playground equipment (for which mulch is our safety surfacing), we need your help!
Greenwood Cemetery Mulch Pile
You can buy mulch, or if you’re up for an adventure and have a car (or a friend with a car), you can load up on free mulch from the pile at Greenwood Cemetery. You can ask at the main entrance, but the mulch pile is down the tiny road to the left IMMEDIATELY after you pass by the entrance station. Drop what you bring inside the play area (along the garden fence is best) and we’ll spread it everywhere that needs it when we’re transplanting late Sunday afternoon! UPDATE, FROM Ansley, 10am Sunday: From Ansley, who stopped by Greenwood this am: Reminder: entrance at 25th st and 5th Ave. Note mulch is low — but you can get a surprising amount off “mulch field.” It’s not really a pile. . . There is a shovel you can use, or there was just now.
It’s springtime…a new season and the perfect time to become a member of the CVEarthlab Community & Educational Garden! CVEarthlab is a wonderful volunteer-led and self-funded communal, child-friendly garden in Concord Village’s Children’s Play Area! We offer amazing opportunities for adults and children to learn about their environment and the plants and animals that inhabit it with them; to grow and enjoy fresh produce; and to share meals, knowledge and experiences with neighbors with a wide variety of backgrounds in gardening. And, it’s crazy fun! Follow this blog (there’s a link you can click on the right or at the bottom depending on your device) or email cvearthlab@gmail.com if you want to learn more! What does being a member mean? You contribute $30 per family (or $10 per individual) . . . and (we hope) help with volunteer work, planting, and watering when you can.
Why do we need members, and why do members need to contribute money? CVEarthLab is self-funded. Over the past 11 years, we’ve invested over $12,000. in cash, donations in kind and grant awards to get the garden off the ground. Most of that was start-up costs, and we were lucky to receive more than $3,000 in grants and in-kind donations, but maintenance is not free! Recent purchases include soil to replenish the beds, an automated drip irrigation system, replacement raised beds and a bench. In spring 2016, we invested about $500 in soil and equipment to refill our 4 older raised beds with new soil (and make 2 of them sub-irrigated) to maintain safe soil quality. And we test the raised bed soil to track changes in our soil over time and ensure we’re growing in safe soil. Besides planting and watering, the garden requires a lot of manpower and a variety of resources. Sustaining its success requires an assortment of efforts and skills, including fundraising, grant researching and writing, researching and writing proposals for the board, website content creation and maintenance, documenting activities and communicating regularly with fellow members, taking photos, soil quality testing and stewardship, harvest potluck party planning and prep, errand running, weather proofing, cat, rat and squirrel deterring, making or buying organic pest sprays and fertilizers, accounting, and all sorts of creative problem solving. And money! It’s clear: we REALLY need volunteers and we hope that our members find many ways to help us grow and maintain our garden! At a minimum, though, we ask that each CVEarthLab member family or individual commit to:
1. Donate $30. per family or $10 per individual each year. You can leave checks, made out to CVOI*, with CVEarthlab in the memo line, in the CV office or arrange for a garden member to pick something up from your doorman by sending a note to cvearthlab@gmail.com . We also accept donations via Venmo electronic payment service. To donate via Venmo, use Lee Stern’s account name @Lee-Stern-4.
So come on and join us!
*CV maintains an account for the Children’s Play Area, and we will deposit CVEarthlab checks to that account.
Even better, we got our cool season crops in: snap peas in lines in the two new sub-irrigated beds (lines along the places where we will soon be re-installing our trellises), and lettuces (a green leaf, a red leaf and arugula) and carrots (for the eastern swallowtail butterflies) in the cold frame bed (lettuces closer to the slides, carrots closer to the play area entrance). Thanks Lucy, Maesie, and Eli! We’ll be eating lettuce and snap peas in June, if all goes well, and will have plenty of carrot greens habitat for our eastern swallow butterflies to lay eggs on, and baby caterpillars to eat! The wonderful thing about the carrots is that the caterpillars don’t start to eat the greens until the carrots are almost ready to harvest — so we get carrots, butterflies get the greens, and we have less to compost!
Remember last year?
Back to our new SIPs: now we’ll see whether the potting soil we purchased from Dahill Landscaping (they gave us a good deal, and threw in a free bale of peat moss — thanks!) works to “wick” the water up from the reservoirs (the space created by the plastic pipe, bottles, or plant pots between plastic lining on the bottom and landscape fabric on the top) to our plants’ roots. The system works very well in the soda bottle SIPs we made for our seedlings, but there we used a piece of old towel through the bottle neck to pull water from the reservoir to the soil. We’ll see if the light soil mixture we created using mostly potting mix and peat moss works, too!
We’ll be figuring out how best to water our new SIPs as we go along. At first — like now — when seeds are planted, we probably need to water from the top, to make sure the seeds germinate. I’m thinking that after the seedlings are established and have reasonably strong root systems, we should try to refill the SIPs through their fill tubes, so that plants grow the strong roots and get water from the bottom. If we keep watering from the top, the system won’t work. We’ll just have to see how often we need to refill the reservoirs — an experiment! The watering schedule (link in the column on the righthand side of the blog) has been updated with new dates for this season and new instructions for the SIPs (after the seeds have germinated and seedlings are established!) — feel free to check it out and think about when you’ll be around to water this season.
More work will being done in the coming weeks — Shari and Denise at different times spent much time making a new raised bed (the green plastic one!), which will be filled with soil, and I think we’ll be changing out the soil in our other bed built in 2011, too.
Look forward to a big work day in early May when we will try to get lots (!!) of people to bring in a few bags of mulch from Greenwood Cemetery’s free supply to replenish our slide and climbing wall safety surfacing, as well as our garden paths. And, of course, transplant our basil, tomato, flower and eggplant seedlings from our March 8th seed planting event!
Welcome to the 2014 garden season! A post will be coming soon about how to become an active member of our garden — CV Earthlab. We need more committed volunteers to keep us invigorated, thoughtful and innovative! Want to learn more? Email us at cvearthlab@gmail.com!
Concord Village EarthLab 