Guidelines for Caregivers
What’s involved with caring for a garden bed in the Community Garden? Ideally, each bed in the garden will have one or more caregivers who have agreed to water, weed, watch for and remove pests and generally care for the plants in the bed until they reach the stage for optimal harvest. For our fist season we have developed the following Guidelines for Caregivers:
GARDEN GUIDELINES
Thank you for joining us in growing fresh, organic food for needy families. To maintain harmony between the multitudes of volunteers, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
· Use organic growing techniques.
No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Ask the Master Gardener or the Community Garden Advisory Team before applying any packaged product.
· Be water wise.
Water the soil, not the leaves. Use mulch. Don’t water at the peak of the day’s heat. Turn off hoses as soon as you have finished.
· Follow the planting plan.
We are following a crop rotation plan to assure soil fertility and plant health. Place plants in beds as designated by the Design Team. Please do not bring your own plants.
· Maintain a tidy appearance.
Help us show Westchester that front yard vegetables can be beautiful. Watch that tools, hoses, and children don’t damage plants. No pets, please, since we’re growing people’s food. Clean up. Put tools away and compost plant clippings. Leave the area a little better than you found it.
· Cooperate with others.
In addition to growing vegetables, we’re growing an additional crop: community spirit. Help us cultivate and harvest this precious resource.
To the Caregivers:
Welcome to the garden team of the Community Garden at Holy Nativity. This email is to orient you to some of the basics. We wish we’d had it available for you as a handout when you signed up, but in our scurry to get the garden ready for the party, some things fell through the cracks, and for this we apologize! Here are answers to a few of the questions we’ve heard floating around the garden:
Q: What is Caregiving for the Community Garden at Holy Nativity?
A: “Caregiving” means you’re the person or the team who raises the vegetables. That includes watering, organic pest control, and maintaining a tidy street appearance. Caregiving might include tying vines to trellises or providing shade control for lettuces. It means harvesting the vegetables as they come ripe and assisting with getting those veggies to the distribution organization. (We’ll be developing this process as we go along!) It means assisting with season-end cleanup like composting old plants and possibly seedsaving if yours is a veggie we wish to propagate.
For most planting seasons in the future, Caregiving will also include planting. However, due to the fact that Garden construction completed so late in the 2008 summer-growing season, we’re doing things a little differently this month. Teams of children all around town have been growing seedlings for the garden. Many of those seedlings are ready for transplanting now, which gains us a month or more over direct seeding. A mixed team of volunteers (whoever shows up!) will be planting all these seedlings on Saturday, June 14, (9:00-12:00 noon). We welcome you to come participate with this special team, which will include Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and many of the kids who nursed the seedlings.
Q: How much time will garden Caregiving take?
A: That’s hard to answer since different crops will require different types of care. For instance, the lettuces will need more frequent watering than the tomatoes will, and all will need more water through the summer heat than through June gloom. If you are concerned about time, perhaps the best approach is to partner with others in care for your garden bed or beds. That way you can give it the “team approach” so that one person can water when another has to pick the kids up from soccer. Please contact the Community Garden Advisory Team if you need to make any adjustments.
Time in a garden is a precious thing. If you sat in the garden the afternoon of the grand opening celebration, the ladybugs circled; the flowers were beautiful; and passersby stopped to marvel. Soak it up - this is part of the “paycheck” you’ll get from working in the garden.
As we experienced the whirlwind of media interviews for live TV, we on the garden team were amazed to learn how much time (6:00 A.M. prep call) and resources (three cars, plus a helicopter overflight, fossil-fueled electricity, not to mention what took place back at their studio) were required for mere minutes of air time. In our contemporary society, we regard this as “normal” and overlook the waste.
In a garden, every second you spend can be productive. Your physical efforts to till the soil return as food and bounty. Your conversation with fellow gardeners breeds closeness to other people of your community. Your time daydreaming or watching the monarch butterfly hover brings peace to your soul. We invite you to discover a different sense of what “time well spent” can mean.
Q: But I have a “brown thumb”!
A: One of the goals of this community garden project is education so that self-labeled “brown thumbs” realize that all of our thumbs get brown as we till the soil and all of our thumbs turn green when we learn to observe and respond to what nature tells us to do. We’ll provide a team of gardening veterans who can answer your questions, give guidance, and offer periodic garden classes to help you.
Because the Community Garden at Holy Nativity is an organic garden, we’ll also be helping those of you new to organic gardening with how to manage soil fertility and pest control without all the garden chemicals to which our society has recently become accustomed. We won’t be using Miracle Gro or Snarol in this garden nor any of those other toxins and petrochemicals in the brightly colored boxes. Realize that it’s only been since World War II that we’ve used this kind of chemical warfare in our gardens; before that time, people had wiser ways. At the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, together we’ll rediscover those ways of caring for the earth and each other.
Q: Why can’t I choose which vegetables grow in my bed?
A: The Community Garden at Holy Nativity is designed with a long-term view. We plan to keep this patch productive for many, many years. That means we must pay attention to plant diseases and soil nutrition. The beds are designed with a planned rotation cycle (more info on this will soon be available through our website). You can learn more about crop rotation at our Plant Rotations class later this season.
Additionally, many of the vegetable varieties we have selected are heirloom or open-pollinated vegetables. That means they haven’t been genetically manipulated; and it means that, if we save seeds, the offspring will breed true, that is, will look like their parents. We can’t be assured of either of these features for garden-center vegetables nor for seeds from some of the major garden catalogs.
And if you really want to be part of the vegetable-selection process, please volunteer for the fall garden design team, which will be working out the Cool Season layouts this August!
Q: Can I eat the vegetables I grow?
A: Our hope is that most of the produce grown in the garden goes to benefit needy families via distribution organizations such as the Food Pantry LAX. Does that mean every single tomato? No, it doesn’t, and that is why we phrased it that way.
Another “crop” we plan to grow at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity is community. Already, at the grand opening celebration, we have experienced the coming together of incredible diversity: creed, color, age, ethnicity. We hope to grow this sense of oneness as an additional “harvest” from our little garden.
Q: Where can I get help?
We plan to hold a series of organic gardening classes. Also, we hope to have specific dates and hours when a Master Gardener will be available in the garden to field your questions. And you can always leave a message for a Master Gardener or for the Community Garden Advisory Team at (310) 670-4777.
More information will come via email and at gatherings such as the following:
** Planting Day, Saturday, June 14, 9:00-12:00 noon
** Introduction to Organic Gardening class, Saturday, June 21, 9:00-10:30
These events are free and open to all (even if you are not a Community Garden Caregiver).
Thank you for joining the garden team and for helping with this wonderful social and environmental project.
The Community Garden at Holy Nativity, 6700 West 83rd Street, Westchester, 310.670.4777 http://www.holynativityparish.org/communitygardenhn.php
