sept 25,2009--you'll know i miss the garden but i am busy every minute trying to get my own little sprout home safe and sound.. see you at the work party on sunday,the 27th.. love nora

Harvesting seeds in the garden

Beautiful red amaranth plants are blooming in the garden--I just learned there are seed varieties and leaf varieties, which explains the different sizes. The seed varieties are the taller plants, which haven't yet set seed. The seeds can be apparently eaten like a cooked cereal. Most likely, people mix it with other grains, since the seeds are so small! Another reason to eat it with other grains is it provides a complete protein that way. A culinary adventure I'd like to try sometime...




The sunflowers did produce seed--here are two heads the squirrels didn't get. I roasted them, but the flavor was not good--too dry. Fed most of it to the chickens, who gobbled them down. There are more seeds to harvest, if anyone wants to try their hand at roasting them, or collecting seed for next year.

Summer Bounty

Some pics of the garden.

Canning Plums

Like Nora mentioned below, the plum canning process was in fact a storm! Nora, Karen, Bonnie, Ellen, Masina, and I (Chris) began at 4 pm on Monday afternoon and didn't leave Masina's plum splattered kitchen crime scene til about 10 that night! 6 hours of canning madness! From it all we made "Santa Rosa Plum Jam" from Bonnie's wonderful Santa Rosa plums, then plum jelly and "Plum Tuckered Chutney" from our bountiful yellow garden plums. Masina and I started jars of plum vinegar from the pits and scraps, and I packed up some to-go bags of pitted plums for freezer storage. As you can imagine, the whole wild plum affair left us all plum-tuckered out. See the beautiful pics above and below...

plum crazy

the quiet before the storm- the storm being putting up some of the plums,canning,making some wine of them, whatever you can make with plums...we'll be picking plums for all this making on sunday if you'll wanna join.. on all other fronts ,things are greening alnd growing and we're still planting as if our lives depended on it.. hum?? nora

vegetables emerging

can't thank casey enough for the topbar beehive hive. it used to be just a sketch on paper and now its real... bring on the bees,we've got a vacancy..and thanks to charles and magi for hauling away unnecessaries, there will be less and less of those when we're done. its looks like we are going to have buckets of tomatoes, and squash and beans and various and sundry other green things and the plums are pluming up .. who wants to make jam,or wine? tomorrow, compost day from the city at 10.30. come and shovel the sh** with us...we're open for a use for the grapes and the blackberries too.. its coming at us, fast and furious... chris, all that greenhouse fussing is paying off and sun and the chickens are both gestating beautifully...thanks to masina and truck for debris decreasing and some clapping for ellen for planting things new and mysterious, luffa? asparagus? and david's art is using the breeze and daniel, well we know you're there daniel...we have been asked to help organize work parties in our immediate environs, like a neighbor who wants to start a garden but needs a jump start or building a raised bed in someone's front yard for a victory garden or ? perhaps a meeting soon to see who is down with being part of such... nora

bombs away

that lifted my spirits up...so much growing in the garden...we all have our own gifts at the garden... nora

old pics from the garden

boy how time flys!

my family and i have only been involved with the garden for a bout a year and a half but we've seen so much change and so much develop here,and with our selves, it is truly amazing how mother nature breaks herself down and then regenerates enough to give to and nurture us all...

every action and creation in the garden starts with a seed figuratively and literally and i enjoy planting them and watching them grow

click on copper sun profile to the left scroll to the bottom and take a look at some of the old pics of our family working and enjoying the garden in my blog
family gardening in ashby community garden, and there will be more to come

"BOMBS AWAY"MUSIC VIDEO FILMED IN ASHBY GARDEN

Ashby Garden has Sprung!

Most of the garden is planted, the pile of branch debris near the Blackberry bramble is almost entirely hauled away (thanks to Masina, Nora, David), the broody chicken is finally, after nearly a month, off her eggs, and it has been gray and overcast for nearly a week. That means our Bay Area Spring is really here! The green house is also overflowing with tomatoes and if anyone wants some plants for their backyard and/or container garden at home please come by next Sunday and take some. They are an unlabeled mystery grab-bag of red and yellow cherry, tomatillos, and others.

I planted some seeds yesterday from my handy planting list (courtesy of the invaluable Golden Gate Gardening book). And if you don't want to pay $102 for a used copy on Amazon (what!?), I'll give you a short list of what seeds you should be planting in June:

Broccoli
Beets
Brussels Sprouts
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Kohlrabi
Lettuce
Celeraic

And, just to make you weep with joy, a baby Sugar Pie Pumpkin...

For more pictures click HERE!

the plan is to show the dvd: getting started in beekeeping with the tophive beehive real soon-i will keep you'll informed as to when and where... blurb says: our primary focus is on improving bee ecology and beekeeping methods that respect the honeybee-our hope is that by introducing new hobby beekeepers to the rewards of beekeeping that there will eventually be backyard beekeepers world wide that will help bring back athe feral bee population aldn improbe the genetic diversity of the honeybee.

garden day-david's art brings color,movement;the powderpuff girls moved in,one had a humpty dumpty moment but back together again by susan;chris started a new isolceles bed and caged stuff with green vinyl ;charles got a super for beehive,its 4 stories now ,very urban and what a story inside;we dug up a 8 foot weed we were ignoring and created a new patch of sunlight;messina planted the little apple tree near the front fence;we kicked around the possibility of new name for the garden something combining laid back and kick ass(more later);aisha brought christopher and azaria by and they planted some seeds and hung out;leah came by and gave us stuff from their house which will sadly soon be history;we took eggs from under the chicken who stubbornly refuses on being broody..oh,ponderous life.

Kick Fard Harm

Happy Mother's Day! What a great gardening day, the Ashby Community Garden was bustling with activity and inspiration. I pulled weeds, "potted-up" (transplanted into bigger pots) some tomato and tomatillo starts in the green house, expanded the small triangular plot by the bench, then made some tomato cages out of plastic fencing to support the tomatoes planted in the new bigger plot (see below). Star, Nora, David, and I, in a moment of exhaustion and delirium, also came up with some ideas for a new garden name (an example of one of the more confusing ones inspired the title of this post).

Star and Nora dug up what we all thought was a giant Swiss Chard, but turned out to look more like a radioactive mutant beet. We were all quite awe-stricken by the huge root which tasted and bled like a conventional red beet.


There's still so much work to do to ensure a bountiful Summer and Fall harvest, but the energy of the garden/ers is so high right now I have no doubt we can all pull it off! For a constantly updated album of Ashby Garden pictures, see my photo album on Flickr.

Exciting New Book!

Found my new favorite DIY reference guide at my new favorite magazine store, Issues, in Oakland. The handwritten and drawn 124 page book is divided into 3 sections, first aid, home and body beautification, and basic gardening. It contains the simplest, most nonjudgmental recipes for all manner of physical, emotional wellness and wellbeing, using easy to access or grow ingredients. The newish niche market for non-toxic cleaning agents can be expensive, confusing, not to mention deceptive, but the simple recipes in this book (most with cheap, friendly, and familiar products like castile soap, baking soda, and tea tree oil) will put the intention of a non-toxic body and home back in your own dirty finger-nailed (but naturally moisturized) hands.

what's up at the garden

so this is what's up..we are going to build a topbar hive and start a new hive at the garden..perhaps as soon as sunday, thanks to a donation from a local communal house....we planted a bigger variety of stuff than we usually do this year and hope to share the harvest with the neighborhood...the chicken coop has new art suited to their temperments...