Back in April, I posted an article about our plan to use a community garden plot this summer to grow fruits, vegetables and more in order to lower our carbon footprint. I told you how our world needs more of these gardens and how they truly do help bring the community closer together. Today, just about three months later, the second harvest is already complete and pollinators are beginning to appear everywhere. Here is what’s happened in the garden so far…
I couldn’t find any photos of what our plot looked like before we built these boxes, but let me tell you, the terrain consisted of dried mud and massive elevation changes for a garden. You can see that, in the bottom left corner of the first photo, we had a box filled with brand new soil since the dirt that came with the plot was dry and, overall in our minds, not great for plants. Other people didn’t do this, but still had incredibly positive outcomes.
On May 15th, we got more plants in the ground. They included peppers, basil, sage in one of two pots, and flowers. We came to the garden that day finding that one of our homemade trellises had collapsed and was unusable. We took that one away as well as another meant for cucumbers.
We saw the first sprout on May 18. It was a pea plant that I had started outside about a month prior and had put into the ground a few days before this happened. The very next day, we went to the garden again to transfer cucumber seedlings from a tray and into the ground. About 30% of them didn’t make it throughout the next week because of high temperatures and stress.
We saw the first potato plant come out of the ground just ten days after it was planted. We planted the potatoes fairly deep to increase the chances of a larger harvest later in the season.
A mere ten days later, the potatoes started to visibly grow in the rows they were planted in. Also, while tending to the cucumbers was tricky, most of them survived but grew slowly.
At the start of June, we chose to rent yet another garden plot. This one was about half the size, but we decided that most of it would be dedicated to wild flowers anyway. Also, this plot provided space for our new tomato seedlings. I had planted them a few weeks prior, not knowing if they would even sprout. Today, they are doing much better than I could have ever imagined.
June 11th was the day that I buried an old, compostable Pela iPhone case in our garden as an experiment to see what would happen. I’ve only checked on it once since, so we’ll see what is to come in the next few weeks.
We left for a week in June and when we returned to the garden, the plants had grown beyond our expectations. June 25 was the day of our first harvest. It consisted only of a handful of peas, but still, at least it was something!
At the beginning of this month, we had our first flower bloom. I felt that wildflowers were a necessary choice to put into the garden so we could give back to the Earth as well as attract pollinators.
This was one of our biggest and most diverse harvests yet. It included a handful of tomatoes and peas, a squash, pepper, and two cucumbers.
July 13th was the day when I found the first pollinator at one of our wildflowers. Check back on GLOBR soon for an article about wildflowers and pollinator gardens.
What I’ve learned so far is that gardening isn’t simple. In fact, sometimes it’s incredibly difficult. However, it also brings the community together, it allows us to take a step back and feel happiness and, in the end, it’s so much better for our planet.
Be sure to check out the GLOBR Twitter page for updates on the garden and more in the future.
GLOBR 
One Comment
Comments are closed.