The Washington Ave garden was a quarter acre parking lot until May 2010. Now it is a gardening destination for the neighborhood, filling up with squash, ripening tomatoes, and content gardeners.

The Ukiah High School Hillside Farm made a huge push the past few months to start a CSA for this summer. Now the hillside above the High School looks like a productive farm straight out of Switzerland, with rows and rows of veggies running along the contours of the hill.

The South Ukiah Head Start Preschool garden broke ground in May of 2009.

The before pictures were taken in November ’09, and the after pictures were taken this week. There is a three sisters garden (corn, beans, and squash), a tomato-pepper-basil jungle, herbs, flowers, strawberries, and a bed waiting

for more greens. Yum.

What To Do in Your Garden This Month
by Suzanne Millard, Mendocino Master Gardener

For new and experienced gardeners alike, mid-summer means harvesting your summer vegetables. Here is a link from the UC Cooperative Extension about planting and storing your harvest. Vegetable gardening at a glance: How to plant and store

Also, during the harvest, food safety is vitally important. Bacteria, viruses and parasites can contaminate your home grown food. Water, tools and animals can spread harmful organisms in your garden. Follow this link for safe and easy tips on how to maintain the integrity of the food from your garden: Food Safety in the Home Vegetable Garden

What to plant?

In August you can directly sow chard, kale, peas (late), cilantro, mustard greens. You can also start lettuce, brassicas, chard, kale, fennel nettles, sweet onions (Italian, Walla Walla, etc.) for planting. Plants ready for transplant are lettuce, leeks, brassicas and chard.

Other activities for August are cleaning-up and composting fallen fruit, sow fall/winter cover crop (barley, vetch, bell beans, diakon, etc.), preserve the harvest and as always, weed!

For more Gardener's Tips, please click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

What to look out for…

Be sure to harvest your vegetables and resist the temptation to leave them past their prime. For example, pick the wonderful bounty of those prolific zucchini plants, look for great recipes and share the harvest with friends and coworkers. Leaving fruit and vegetables on the plants attracts pests that you don’t want onto your plants. Any vegetables picked past their prime can be sent to your compost pile for natural decomposition in the right environment.

Don’t forget, now is the time to start thinking about broccoli, garlic, onions and other cool season crops. Come September you’ll want to clean up your spent summer plants and ready your garden for the next round of plants.

Just a friendly reminder that there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

Happy Mendo Gardening!

This is from The Gardens Projects weekly column in the Ukiah Daily Journal, "Something To Chew On." It comes out in the Friday edition. Hope you enjoy reading it.


GOTTA HAVE 'EM??

My most beloved billboard has been defaced.

My most beloved billboard lies between Hopland and Ukiah, just South of the Nelson Vineyards, on the East side of 101. Looking out over the highway and a field of grapes, my beloved billboard was a true gem. Unbridled capitalism at it’s finest. My beloved is a McDonalds french fries advertisement.

Generally, billboards disgust me. Advertising gnaws at my soul – trying to convince us that we are not perfect just the way we are and that we need something we don’t. One evening at Al’s Redwood Room in Willits, a man who looked an awful lot like David Bowie summed it up well: “if it can’t sell by word of mouth, it ain’t worth squat.” And billboards offend me most - marring and disrupting landscapes, so behemoth and obnoxious. They distract! I would like to look at trees if zooming about in an automobile, but over and over I find my eyes drawn to billboard after billboard…

This billboard, though. This billboard was different. I could not bring myself to despise this billboard. It was a platonic ideal, the billboard all other billboards aspire to be. It seeped into the viewer’s brain like a subliminal message and washed over them like a tidal wave of sugar water, so simply and insidiously telling us that we need something we clearly do not. It stood loud and proud and proclaimed: “I am a billboard. I lie and manipulate for profit and I pretend to be nothing else! But I look darn good doing it.”

My favorite billboard was awash in red and yellow. On the right: a French fry carton taller than a tall man, exploding with those perennially enticing Mcdonalds french fries and awash in Jesus light. To the left of the fries, a giant hand reaches out of nowhere, straining for but painfully separated from those golden delectables. And to the far left, for the majority of the billboard, loom the words “GOTTA HAVE ‘EM.” It was plain and simple. It was short and sweet. It was aesthetically pleasing brainwash that made no pretence to be anything but exactly what it was.

But this charming example of advertising has been blighted. Our platonic ideal has been dethroned. Some nefarious trickster with a spray can has defaced the greatest billboard in all of Mendocino County by adding a question mark. Two question marks, in fact. The billboard now reads “GOTTA HAVE ‘EM??”. This changes everything.

Now, instead of looking at this billboard and unconsciously being told and accepting what to consume and how to live my life, I will have to ask questions. Do I gotta have ‘em? Do I gotta have those fries? It’s not so easy, now! Before, I wouldn’t have even asked – I would have just known that I gotta have ‘em. But now that I cannot ignore the question, the sneaking suspicion creeps into my mind that, no, I don’t gotta have ‘em. I don’t gotta have those fries. In fact, I think I’m gonna go to the garden and have some carrots and strawberries instead. What? Where am I? Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’ve landed in the strange land of critical, conscious consumption and the tomatoes here are tastier than any I’ve had before.

That dastardly trickster! Leaving me with these questions that beg answers and lived life to understand and explore them. The trickster’s execution was even poor! Penning question marks with ragged edges, not in line with the rest of the text. And two question marks? Really? I think one would have sufficed, and still left us with the haunting question: “gotta have ‘em?” It’s definitely something to chew on.



yours truly,

Well Summer seems to finally be here after a spring that brought mild temperatures and a lot of rain. Of course not being from California, I'm not used to the triple-digit days that we've started to get. It also seems like some of the plants were caught a little bit off-guard as well. We've had to adjust the time for our drip irrigation to give the plants a little bit more water in the mornings. One of the plants that seems to be thriving though is our sunflowers. The plants are already taller than I am (At just over 6 feet that is saying something) and they seem to have no complaints about the warm weather we're having. Our tomato plants are all looking to be in really good shape as well

All of the kids have gone home for the summer, but before they left they had one last art project. The kids collected some flat rocks in the river, which they then painted, and those rocks are now being used to decorate the garden. One of the kids decorated a rock to act as a natural pesticide (see picture to the right.) It seems to be working well enough, although I don't think it's killing the insects as much as just causing all of the ants to move inside the building (probably because it's a whole lot cooler in here.) More updates to come, but I'd also like to take this time to briefly thank our Garden Coordinator Mary Essenbock who has shepherded our garden through some of the initial growing pains.

Happy Gardening Everybody!
Campbell Grant
Americorps Volunteer

It's July! That means hot weather, BBQ, hanging out by the pool and Zucchini. If you don't have some zucchini planted this summer we can guarantee your neighbor, grandmother, friend, or co worker does and they are trying to get rid of some. Looking for a new way to cook the zucchini? Try grilling it after marinating it. Check out the recipe below and good luck with your zucchini.

Ingredients:

• 2 T of orange rind
• 3/4 orange juice
• 1/2 cup lime juice
• 3 T honey
• 2 t olive oil
• 1/2 t of salt
• 1/4 t crushed red pepper

• 2 red onions
  
• 1 1/4 pound zucchini
• 1 pound yellow squash
• 3 T finely sliced basil

Combine first seven ingredients into a zip lock bag. Chop up onion, zucchini, squash and add to zip lock bag. Place in refrigerator for at least an hour. Drain veggies into a colander, turn on your drill and cook for about 8 min. Good luck and happy July!

A big thank you to Lovin' Blooms and the Anderson Valley High School Agriculture Department for such generous donations of starts to The Gardens Project. Last week we were up to our ears in plant starts - four different varieties of tomatoes, tomatillos, chives, bunching onions, two different varieties of eggplants, endless peppers, and so much more!

The donations were given to Nokomis, S. Ukiah Head Start, Orchard Head Start, Willits Head Start, Orchard, Jack Simpson, Grace Hudson Elementary, and Pomolita Middle School, Calpella Elementary, Round Valley Elementary, Blosser Elementary, Oak Manor Elementary, River Oak Charter School and Eagle Peak Middle School. Wooza!

Check out the picture to see how much they donated, its a sight to see. Imagine in September when these lovin' plants have a lovin' bounty of food.

Thanks Lovin' Blooms and Anderson Valley High!

Well, summer is definitely here. The solstice is already two weeks past, and things couldn't be busier! Yesterday evening, all of The Gardens Project staff were so busy with workshops, work parties, child care, and other Gardens Project related endeavors that we couldn't even manage to attend each other's events to show our support. But, all this hard work is paying off as the summer produce rolls in. We've been eating loads of fresh picked squash, and rumors about fresh tomatoes already being eaten are flying around our office.

We hope you've felt the productive juices of summer coursing through your veins as well, and that your summer gardens are beautiful and booming. Here at The Gardens Project, we always love to hear what is happening in your gardens. Drop us a line! Ask us a question. Send us a photo of your garden so we can share it with the rest of The Gardens Network. We want to hear from you.

Keep up all the good work. And make sure your tomatoes are staked or caged.

horticulturally yours,

The Potter Valley Youth and Community Center Garden is starting to look good as we begin our first growing season! We just installed our drip irrigation, and this being the first time I had ever installed drip irrigation, I felt a lot of satisfaction getting everything set up with just a little bit of outside help. Thanks to the wonderful work of our Garden Coordinator Mary Essenbock, as well as the kids in the summer program, most of our starts have now been planted. We’ve got all kinds of things going in; tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, pumpkin, peas, lettuce and some flowers to make everything come together. Some of the peas and lettuce that we planted in window boxes are a little further along, and will probably be the first things to yield produce. Our next steps are trying to get some wood-chips to mark off our pathways, and to put some stakes in the ground for some tomatoes as they start to come up. Other than that, everything is going great! Hope everyone else can say the same,

Campbell Grant

PVYCC Garden

What to do in Your Garden This Month
by Suzanne Millard, Mendocino County Master Gardener

It has been quite an interesting month for weather. Rain has continued to fall through the month and cooler temperatures than the seasonal norms have prevailed. While we have seen the effects of El Nino since the beginning of the year, some weather bloggers now say it is over. Looks like we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, we are still pulling up those weeds in the garden to keep the pests at bay.

What to plant?

For June and July you can directly sow beans, beets, chard, corn, turnips and kale. You can also start heat tolerant lettuce, chard, leeks and at the end of the month, brassicas for planting. Plants ready for transplant are lettuce and chard.

Flowers and herbs appropriate for June and July direct sowing are Lobella, Alyssum, Limonium, Zinnias, Amaranth, Petunias, Marigolds, Cosmos, Tithonias, Ageratum, Strawflowers, Calliopsis, Cleome, Celosia, Sanvitalia, Morning Glory, Nasturtiums, Dahlia, Heliotrope, Gomphrena, Geraniums, Sunflowers, Impatiens, Nicotiana, Thunbergia. Basil and heat tolerant flowers are ready at this time for outdoor transplanting.

For more Gardener's Tips, please click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

What to look out for…

This is prime tomato growing season. For best results here are some tips to maximize your tomato crop:

• Amend soil with good fresh compost. Too much nitrogen will create lots of green growth. Calcium is important for tomatoes so any fertilizers should be calcium rich.
• Support your indeterminate tomato plants. These are not the bush varieties but the tall tomato plants. With many of these plants, regular tomato cages just won’t hold the weight or the size of these plants. Heavy duty home built cages can be built, but be sure use supporting materials that allow you to easily get to the fruit. Cages should be 6’ to 7’ high to accommodate a healthy tomato plant.
• Water consistently to prevent blossom end rot. Water deeply twice a week at the beginning of the season and then reduce water as fruit ripens.
• Be on the lookout for wilting on your tomato plants. Verticillium Wilt (Verticillium IPM Pest Note) and Fusarium Wilt (Fusarium IPM Pest Note) are two plant diseases that can impact your tomato plants.

Towards the end of July, you’ll want to start planning your cool season garden. Now is the time to lay out your garden plan on paper and choose what plants you’ll want to have through the fall.

Just a friendly reminder that there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

From The Gardens Project's weekly column in the Ukiah Daily Journal, Something To Chew On:

PARADISE AND THE PARKING LOT

This is a tale of transformation and renewal – an empty parking lot to community garden story…
Not so very long ago, in the magical valley of Ukiah, just North of the Myers Dentistry building and just West of the Ford dealership, there sat an empty, there sat a quarter acre parking lot that had been unused and neglected for decades. The land beneath the asphalt yearned for a purpose.
Lynda Myers, owner of the lot and the building next to it, listened to the lot's yearning and felt motivated to call Miles Gordon, Project Coordinator of The Gardens Project, in July 2009. She said, "Miles, I want to turn this parking lot into a community garden." Miles replied, "That sounds like it has potential. We'll look into it."
In August, three AmeriCorps volunteers arrived to The Gardens Project in Ukiah and started looking earnestly into the possibility of turning that empty lot into a garden. In November, they canvassed apartment buildings in the neighborhood, assessing whether there was interest in a community garden. There was interest, and that weekend twelve excited gardeners-to-be stood in the middle of that empty lot, dreaming a transformation.
The soil under the asphalt was tested for contaminants of folly past. It was clean.
Throughout the winter and into early Spring of this year, The Gardens Project worked with Kim Jordan and others in the planning department of the City of Ukiah to define the language and conditions of the permitting process for a community garden on private land in Ukiah, since this had never been done before. We hammered it out and obtained the first permit for such a garden.
It was time to take out the asphalt, which fortunately was quite thin and crumbly. A front loader scraped off the asphalt and top few inches of soil in a few hours.
The California Conservation Corps of Ukiah donated their entire Corps to The Gardens Project on April 22, Earth Day, and twenty of those Corps members went to work on the Washington Ave. garden, trenching and laying irrigation, pick-axing the hard packed ground and sifting out thousands of rocks.
The neighborhood noticed the transformation that was happening. When the garden opened its gates to the public in late April, all forty one plots were claimed by eager gardeners within two weeks – people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the space or resources to have a garden. The gardeners prepared their garden beds, installed drip irrigation, lay cardboard and woodchips in the paths, held meetings and organized to create a productive, safe community space. And, of course, they planted their garden beds.
Less than two months after the asphalt came out, tomatoes, peppers, squash, flowers, herbs, peas, cactus, tomatillos, corn, and more are thriving. The Gardens Project invites and encourages you to come take a look at this garden at 168 Washington Ave., North of the Myers Dentistry building. It is a beautiful site to behold. To see pictures of this transformation, click here.
We at The Gardens Project are eager to apply what we learned during this process to the development of other community gardens, and there is a need for more of these gardens. There are currently waiting lists at every community garden in Ukiah. 41 plots filled up in less than two weeks at the newest garden. People are hungry for the chance to dig in to the earth and have the satisfaction of growing their own fresh, healthy food.
Here’s something to chew on: The Gardens Project needs access to land to create these spaces, especially in the North and South ends of Ukiah. If you have a lead on a plot of land that could be turned into a community garden, please let us know by calling Miles Gordon at 462 - 2596 x 103 or emailing mgordon@ncoinc.org.