Flowers too!
Volunteers from: Redeemer, First Parish, and Hancock working along with a few other supporters
Weather: Beautiful! 70 degrees, sunny and dry.
Today’s contributions for the Lexington Food pantry (totaling 103 pounds) included: cucumbers, eggplant, yellow squash, onions, kale, potatoes, Swiss chard, beets, beans, peaches, mint thyme, basil and blueberries.
Where pole beans and peas once were, Carla has planted broccoli and beets. New paths were needed. First buckwheat hulls were poured around the stalks, and then layers of wet newspaper were laid carefully down the row, followed by a layer of straw. The paths curb weeds, help retain moisture and signal us where to walk.
Normally we schedule 10 – 12 people for a mid-summer Saturday and sometimes people drop by who find they can help after all. Today we had 18 people sign in at the barn! This morning’s extras jumped right in and helped make everything go smoothly. In fact, there was enough time at the end to not only weed, but to also put in some new paths.
Sorting the Onions
Onions—This morning all the rest of the onions were pulled. Carla noticed the greens starting to go bad, a signal to pull all of them out before it spread to the onion. Some were cleaned and trimmed and sent to the pantry, but most were set aside to dry and will be delivered later in batches.
This is the picture I should have had last week when I wrote about the onions. Here they are as they appeared this morning ready to be pulled– bursting out of the soil, almost lying on top. Believe me; no great effort was required to harvest them!
Potatoes—potatoes were dug for the first time this season. Our youngest volunteer this morning, Bjorn, really got into it especially after Carla told him about cut worms. After finding two, he got very excited and then more so when he got permission to feed them to the chickens.
Look what I found!
Are these cut worms?
After the potatoes were all dug up, the hills were leveled. Unlike the other vegetable beds that were replanted with new crops once their produce was exhausted, the potato beds will be planted with winter rye to begin the process of adding nutrients back to the soil.
Digging for Potatoes
Finding Potatoes
Cleaning the Potatoes
Similar to the onions, some of the potatoes were cleaned and set aside to be delivered another week. And by the way, cleaning means brushing off the dirt, not washing them. You shouldn’t wash potatoes before you are ready to use them or else they will begin to rot.
Not where’s Waldo. Where’s the basil?
Basil—After being asked to cut the basil, I sure felt sheepish, asking other volunteers if they knew where the basil was…after all I had cut it last week as well! Turns out that the basil, planted close to the squash, was totally hidden by the squash plants that must have tripled in size in the past week! We all got a good laugh out of that.
Beans—We asked Jackie what she and Linda were picking and it turns out it was green beans. But the plants weren’t what we expected—they were short and bushy. Turns out they were “bush beans” and we were only familiar with pole beans! The beans themselves look very similar, but just as the names suggest, bush beans grow on low bushy plants, usually no more than 2 ft. tall, while the pole bean plants can grow as tall as 10 ft and need staking.
Male Squash Blossoms?
Female Squash Blossom
Squash blossoms—We learned this morning that squash blossoms can be either male or female. Female blossoms become squash and the males are there strictly for the pollination. If you are a gardener and gourmet, you must learn to identify male from female blossoms. Otherwise you risk your squash harvest if you pick the wrong blossoms to use in the kitchen!