Lexington Interfaith Garden

By Amy Swanson

Tuesday couldn’t have been a nicer day to work…not too hot, and not too cloudy. The crew of Connie, Linda, MaryAnn and I picked pole beans and tomatoes and did basic “maintenance” gardening. That included weeding, some watering, thinning one lettuce bed to start another lettuce bed, pulling the last of the cucumber plants and putting up a new rabbit fence around the young lettuce.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived was that instead of seeing potato furrows, I now saw green rows of broccoli and lettuce. I find it amazing how our head farmer keeps optimizing the use of this fertile soil. This activity is waning as the month progresses….It is not too early to add frost into the garden calculus and slow down the replanting.

The next thing I noticed was the beautiful purples and greens of the bok choy (I think donated by Guy Doran) and lush Savoy and purple cabbages. Makes you want to paint them. With the significant Asian population at the Lexington Food Pantry, these greens should be appreciated.

What is not thriving:
Celery—some bug appears to have taken root
Broccoli—the more mature bed is being attacked by some critters…chipmunks?

What is thriving: Everything else. We were going to pull the squash plants, but lo and behold, there were more flowers and young squash so we’ll wait a bit longer.

What I learned:
I’ve noted before how I even admire the weeds–how healthy they are compared to those in my yard. Well, I discovered from Linda, my co-weeder, that one of the fat succulents I had been pulling is purslane, a valued green eaten in many other parts of the world. According to Wiki, “…the stems, leaves and flower buds are all edible. Purslane can be used fresh as a salad, stir-fried, or cooked like spinach.” In fact, Purslane contains more Omega 3s than any other leafy vegetable plant. Linda gladly collected some to take home!

And by the way, I heard that almost 100 pounds were picked and delivered to the Pantry last Saturday!! Lots of big juicy tomatoes and more!

By Mark Sandeen

We’ve delivered over 200 pounds of fresh, healthy, organic produce to the food pantry in just the last two weeks! We have now delivered just under 600 pounds from the garden this season. Take a look at our harvest webpage to see how our garden is growing and what is growing.

This morning Carla delivered Katahdin potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, lots of beautiful cherry tomatoes, green and yellow beans, radishes, eggplant, pumpkins, basil, swiss chard and flowers to the food pantry. We filled up the entire back of her station wagon as well as the front passenger seat.

For those of you keeping tabs on the contest: There are 21 people still in contention to win the award for most accurate guess of how many pounds the garden will grow… unfortunately, Dana, Ron, Teresa, Connie, Tom, Barbara, and Amy are no longer in the running…

Krista Tippett, host of Speaking of Faith, has created a fabulous webpage dedicated to the ethics of eating.

On that website you can listen to her interview with Barbara Kingsolver on the longings and lessons of a year in which she primarily ate what she could grow herself. Her book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, about that experience is now a staple in our cultural reappraisal of the ethics of eating. And food, she says, is a moral arena in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice.

There are stories by other gardeners, one of whom concludes…

“Spiritual” is not a word I use very much these days. It’s too nebulous, and encourages sentimentality. But I am interested in the actions that bring us back into balance, that make us whole human beings. And planting the garden with friends does that in two ways.

The most important way for me is how it brings us into a deeper sense of community and friendship. The garden is something we will share — the work of setting out the plants and tending them, as well as the pleasures that will come in a few weeks as we begin to eat the fruits of our labors. And it’s been made possible by two people who are intent on living a shared life with their friends.

By Amy Swanson

Saturday was like old home week at the Garden. Knowing that Barbara had put out a call for volunteers, I popped over on Saturday to see if they needed any help. There was Carla, Marilyn and Bob Lund, Barbara Munkres, and Mark Sandeen, and some other volunteers that I had the pleasure of meeting.

Here are updates from the garden:

-Carla caught 2 squirrels and a chipmunk. Thank goodness, because after feasting on the corn, they had moved on to the tomatoes.

-Pumpkins were harvested! Not only super early, but these were the volunteers that were growing in the compost! And there are plenty more on those vines. (You can see them in the picture below.)

-The last of the 1st crop of green beans were harvested….the plants have re-flowered and we can expect more abundance in beans in round 2 coming later.

– I wasn’t around for the final weigh-ins, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we surpassed last week’s 50+ lbs of produce. This Saturday we picked: potatoes, cucumbers, squash, basil, rosemary, pumpkins, green beans, Swiss chard, beets, beet greens, green peppers and flowers. There was so much coming in that we had to set up a production weighing line.

There is a technique in harvesting chard. Carla cuts individual leaves down at their base, never taking the whole head, as you might with lettuce. Chard is a plant that as many others, responds well to being cut. It tends to keep producing if regularly cut.

Know what makes Mark happy? Letting him carry the tray brimming with very fragrant basil and rosemary.

By Barbara Munkres

Trinity Covenant and Friends Meeting helped Pilgrim Church provide helpers at the Interfaith Garden. Thanks to liaison Marilyn Lund, an abundance of workers turned out on Tuesday to harvest, weed, and compost.  Mary Mackie of Pilgrim reported that some people were digging potatoes and teenagers put up a soft fence around the tomatoes to protect them.  One of the boys added fox urine to the soil around the tomatoes, which in addition to the fence, helps repel critters.

Mary Mackie and Carla prepared some compost to add to a new bed and Pat Rabby helped mix it into the soil. Then lettuce was planted in the new bed along with Dianthus.  Deborah Burger weeded (her specialty, she says!) along with others.  Eleanor Smith picked cucumbers and weeded.  Flowers and broccoli were treated with water and Bu-T-Grow.  Bean plants were trimmed of old stems, leaving the stems which are still producing.

Things I love about the Interfaith Garden are the chance to reconnect with old friends from other congregations and to make new ones.

Thank you to the many volunteers who came to the garden to help out on both Tuesday and Saturday of Week 21.  On Saturday, Mark Sandeen took a picture of some of the harvest and some of the workers before we walked over to the Food Pantry to deliver.  Thanks, Mark!

From left, Barbara, Sarah Chu, Carla, Jennifer Johnson, Sou Chu, and Marilyn Lund.  Also present were Amy Swanson, Bob Lund, and of course, Mark.