Free is just around the corner!

Thanks to great community and the symbiotic relationship between those people we can take a problem and turn it into a blessing. Often there is an abundance of both people with to much and people who want or need in a community setting, it just takes some effort and communication to bring them together.
In this case there was a local young family who had a garden almost being taken over by strawberry plants and raspberry bushes, they needed people to come and take what they could dig out of the garden for free. So here we see people helping one another out and both benefiting greatly from it. It's a beautiful thing and a natural balance in life.
This family posted an add in our local food coalition's mass e-mail list, and lucky for us my estate mate read through all the adds and alerted me of this great opportunity. We took our shovels and some large pots down the road about 10 minutes, found the house and greeted the family. When we arrived there was already a local strawberry enthusiast digging up her fill of plants. The man showed us around the garden, told us what was off limits, gave me some asparagus growing tips and left us to our digging. Now its funny when you think about it because this guy just has to write a e-mail, point to some plants and people will come over and do all the hard work for him, but those people doing the work feel as though they are getting a great deal by getting tons of free plants just by having to go do some mild digging... Funny because they both feel like they are winning! COZ THEY ARE!!! GO COMMUNITY AWESOMENESS!!!!

These are the raspberries... He said the ones that were bigger and growing along the fence were off limits but they had all shot out thousands of little suckers into the garden creating a carpet of little plants. All we had to do was dig down and pull up a few big clumps. Now when I say little I don't mean tiny little starts, I mean these are a couple feet tall and already have thorns... These guys are virile!

These are the strawberries... I was jealous of his, they were much larger and he had a lot more of them. Now if you remember we already have a whole established raised bed full of strawberries and also a clay pot that I transplanted some into, so we have no shortage of berries but more never hurt anyone! yum yum yum!!!

So the moral of the story is that LOCAL is BETTER! 

We are POWERFUL as a COMMUNITY

and 

Food is FUN!

Link* to Nevada County's Local Food Coalition

Link* to "Nevada County Grown"

Link* to Local Nevada County Classifieds

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More Progress... More callouses...

It's only 3:00 and already we have made a lot of progress in the gardens. After getting a truck load of aged manure yesterday we were ready to get to work this morning.  

 Just to give you an idea of how stoked we are! This is the local aged horse manure that we have a seemingly endless supply of and its just down the street! It is teeming with red worms! 

 

We put in a couple of wheel barrows full of aged manure, some peat moss, compost and nutrients put into one of last years beds that already has some asparagus growing in it..( you can see it over along the left hand side ) We ran some shovels through everything to mix in all the new amendments and it is almost ready to plant!

Little baby asparagus spear

This is another beautiful bed that was also amended and turned over today... whew... This one took some serious muscle! I feel like I have been shovelling for a month straight...

Endless wheel barrow loads...

Our Black Beans went in the ground today!

It is kind of hard to see in this picture but this is the bean trellis I built yesterday.  I'm pretty proud of it, its going to look great once its all grown in with meandering vines... It is made out of three long bamboo poles with a piece of metal fencing attached with wire. At the top I put another piece of salvaged fencing and slipped it over the bamboo, secured it with wire and secured the other end to the fence. The vision is to create a walk through trellis... I hope they get tall enough...

Here is the trellis from another angle...

 Here we have my second bean trellis... This one is in NO WAY as pretty as the other one.. I used a roll of fencing that was driven over in the driveway and was quite mangled. I didn't want it to go to waste so I did the  best I could to straighten it out. I used the same technique as before and wired the fencing to the vertical bamboo poles and then attached the top piece to the back fence to make a sort of tunnel... It will be the tunnel of bean love! In the bottom of the picture you can see the baby Jacobs Cattle Bean starts that will make this trellis home... I also filled in the rest of the row with yellow snap bean seeds.

So this is bed all fluffy, amended and ready for more planting. In the back you can see the bean trellis a little better. This was the last of the beds in this garden that needed to be turned over so now we are ready to get everything in the ground in the next couple of weeks... Along the left side you can barely see the Dino Kale and Rocket Arugula I planted as sort of boarder. We are planning on making this one of the tomato beds, and our greenhouse is busting at the seams with HUGE, LUSCIOUS plants just itching to stretch their legs!

This bed has been sort of a afterthought and has been left alone until now. The leeks, onions and garlic have been residing in this bed and have had the whole thing all to themselves. We have so much more to plant this year and cannot really afford to leave any space unused so we tilled up the soil in between the rows and amended it so we can plant squashes, pumpkins and other trailing plants. This bed has fencing on two sides of it so I am hoping to utilize it as a sort of trellis for the squashes.

As we were turning over the rows we thinned out some of the crowded onions.. Spring onions are great with brussel sprouts, green beans with butter and white wine!
 

Our stunning strawberry bed, with some chive and leeks to keep them company. This bed has been planted and producing for quite a few years now, it was here way before we were... I cannot wait for the little succulent gems! yummmmmm

Great view of our newest garden. The two beds on the right have been planted for a week or two already and are looking beautiful and healthy. The middle bed in the back row was just planted with the remainder of our red cabbage and broccoli with beets, marigolds and sunflowers sprinkled in. The other three beds are being built, filled and awaiting plants.

Here is an up close shot of the newest bed with the cabbage, broccoli etc... The planter at the foot of the bed has Kale, Opal purple basil, sunflowers and nasturtium.

So much done and so much more to do!

puppy in a pot