Here we go! Weekly community dinners begin again, YES! — plus compost struggles, and string bean tale.

This summer, we took three months off, rather than two months. And it was a wise decision. Not only were we ready and willing to start again, but by this time we were excited!

Plus, our dear Brie, who used to live here, was back in town for a few days.

Here she is, preparing the patio for Thursday evening’s commencement, Rebecca in background.

Plus, it was our dear Dan’s birthday. 26 years old! He had wanted an introspective birthday. Sorry, pal. But he did get a solo walk in Griffy Lake woods before the start of the party. So He grinned and let it all happen on schedule and with his special birthday song, of course! Also a birthday cake.

Plus, given that we have a plethora of unripe tomatoes (we got them in slightly late, and it’s not been hot enough lately for them to ripen),

he decided to fry up some green tomatoes in cornmeal for his contribution. Yum.

Meanwhile, as usual, the two tables were loaded with food for the 25 folks, all total, who showed up, including seven girls and boys, ranging from the age of one month to teenage, most of whom tended to sneak cupcakes while playing hide and seek throughout our extensive gardens.

“Asiri,” I commanded to one of the girls: “Make sure the kids don’t step  in the garden beds!”

“Oh we don’t!,” she replied. “That’s the RULE.”

From now until mid-June 2018, the weekly dinners will be held on the patio until it gets too cold, then back inside, one of the three living rooms in one of our three homes — unless of course, someone else in the hood wants to host one!

I totally forgot to take pictures of Tuesday evening’s GAV work party. Just know that we had several projects going, including digging a trench, and clean up of unwanted plants. Two young visitors, Peyton and Christina, who live in Bloomington but found us through the woofer website, came to meet and to join us. And returned two days later for the dinner. YES! Welcome to the village!

I did get pics of our two compost buddies, Dan and Sam, here all geared up:

Ye gods, how do you start that thing?

It took awhile, like twenty tries? Thirty? Forty? Until finally . . . yes, here goes, sawing through the brambles to make more compost.

They had already tried the new (to us: from Habitat restore) mulching machine.

Thirty tries, and the machine kept breaking. See it? On the right of photo below.

O.K. From now on, use the mulcher only to chew up leaves.

_____

Oh, and BTW: Rebecca came in the other day to tell me that I shouldn’t have given the long old string beans to the chickens. That those are heirloom “string” green beans, and she wants to save them  for SEEDS.

“Oh!” I responded, “you mean that’s why I kept having to spit out strings when I was trying to chew them?”

“Yes! Haven’t you heard of ‘string bean parties,’ where farm women used to sit around together stripping the beans from the string beans?”

Nope. Completely new to me.

This week’s work party — and much more!

This week I decided to put up our work party news inside a larger story, as it does seem that we are all living inside the eye of some kind of global hurricane. What better reason to continue to rebirth the new world?

Inside the eye of hydra-headed global storm: new world a-borning

GAV, end August: garden work parties, plus pod meeting — followed by, surprise!

Well, well. These past few days have been veeerrry interesting. First of all, we heard “through the grapevine” — I won’t identify the guilty party here — that podmates Dan and Logan, rather than returning from their three week road trip to the west coast on August 31, would extend it for two more weeks!

WHAT?

Okay. Regroup. Do stuff that would otherwise wait for Dan to come home.

Rebecca: “Sam! Will you fill in?”

Sam: “Yes.”

Rebecca: “Okay, read up on how to layer a compost pile.”

Not sure what Sam read, but here’s one:

How to Layer a Compost Pile

For sure we do have all the ingredients: both brown (carbon: mostly sticks, leaves) and green (nitrogen: veggie and plant leavings), and manure to heat up the layers. But: we don’t have enough for all the compost we plan to make. So, thanks to Rebecca’s sleuthing, we used her trailer to haul spent grains —

donated from Big Woods Brewery, lots of table scraps from The Farm restaurant, and horse manure from Devonshire Stables. All local, of course!

Here’s Sam, as he willingly begins to tackle his immense task, accumulated from Dan being gone nearly three weeks.

Several hours later, here’s his finished, layered, compost pile (that’s a red onion skin on top).

And here’s the entire compost area. Neat. Organized.

Meanwhile, I was out in the garden cutting off the kale leaves which had been turned to lace by all the cabbage moths. Grrrr. . .

Rebecca says they will grow new leaves, but we’re going to cover them all with shade cloth meanwhile to keep out the moths.

Meanwhile, the beans, on their tripod structure that Dan made (which you can’t see, to the left) are producing mightily. See Sam in background, hard at work.

We’ve already harvested beans once, and podmate Andreas will harvest again, today, distributing to all three village homes.

That was Monday. On Tuesday, we held our regular work party, and decided to do a pod meeting afterwards, rather than wait two more weeks for Dan and Logan to return.

Rebecca huddles with Andreas, Sam, Dario, and John, as to what’s needed now.

Basically, this is a clean-up operation. Andreas and Sam dispatched to the chicken yard to take out little trees with our nifty Puller Bear.

And Dario and John remained next to the garage wall, asked to start dismantling the short brick section that’s crumbling next to it.

Seeing me with my camera, they decided to add some drama . . .

Meanwhile, I was futzing around, pulling plants we call “weeds” and taking more pics. Here’s the gigantic and very productive tomato patch (planted on the old chicken yard) now.

Here’s the greenhouse, temporarily just for storage. However, Rebecca is beginning to plant seeds for winter green production in the five new Garden Towers and their greenhouse. More on that soon.

I love this giant leaf!

Finally, here’s the latest addition to one of the stone sculptures. A mirror! “So I can pluck my chin hairs,” Rebecca tells me. (That’s “crone hairs,” to me. )

Oh yes, on to the “surprise!  of this post: It turns out that our gossipmonger was wrong, Dan and Logan are on their way back now! When I texted Dan yesterday, the day of their scheduled return, asking, “Is it true that you won’t return for two more weeks?” I got back, “Huh, where did you get that? We’re heading to Denver now, probably Kansas City Friday, and back Saturday.”

Okay! So look what we got done in the meantime, just because we thought they weren’t coming home soon. At our pod meeting, BTW, we decided to begin our regularly weekly scheduled open dinner night on September 14, that’s a Thursday (note change from Wednesday), 6:30 p.m.

GAV news, second week June: Rebecca, our mentor, gone for two weeks. HELP!

Our master gardener (and property manager) Rebecca is in  California for a greatly needed two week vacation. However, I doubt she’s really getting away in her mind, given all the texts flying back and forth between her and us workers left behind. And this week, I’ll tell you, has been a tale of mistakes, setbacks, near-mistakes, and lots of laughing.

First of all, the long-promised tomato patch with 28 tomatoes is finally up and growing, after the work party  to dismantle all the invasives that had taken that area over even before I arrived on the scene 15 years ago.

Our wonderful nearly-a-month-long IU intern Grant, who was to stay on five days after Rebecca left, thought he knew which tomato plants she wanted planted in that new bed. (We still have tomato seedlings left over from sale and give-away, and, we realize now, they are of many different kinds.) Well, it turns out, he was wrong. Who knows what was planted! And Rebecca has very decided ideas about which types of tomatoes she wants in that new bed. So, guess what . . . all the work gone into that bed while she’s away is for naught!

Here are Dan, Nezhla (Rebecca’s daughter and dog sitter) and Grant, hard at work mulching with leaves and setting up cages around the (wrong) tomato plants.

Rebecca tells us she’ll see to the replanting when she gets back late June 22nd.. Meanwhile, we’re thinking about taking the plants that are in there now to Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard.

BTW: the project to set up a lattice fence around the pepper plants out front is still on hold, since I haven’t heard back from the Next Door person who told me she has plenty of big strong bamboo — what is her street address??? Meanwhile, we’ve almost forgotten about that project, given all the watering that has been necessary during the recent hot drought — until yesterday, when it finally rained.

I’ve been busy talking with folks who want to move here, both to the new DeKist house (where we would like to see a young family move in) and the two rooms, one available now, and the other in August, in the first DeKist house. All incredible candidates! Each of them just what we’re looking for. Will set a strong collective intention that all works out as planned, and meanwhile, not mention it here again until it does!

One of the people who might move here looked over to the gigantic elderberry bush in the front yard at the first DeKist house and exclaimed: “You should harvest the lower hanging flowers for tea!” Later she continued: “Just take the flowers that are still full of pollen, and dry them in wicker baskets inside out of the sun, where they get a breeze.  Well, what she said got in my craw, and so three days later, this morning, I finally looked it up on the internet, and then called Rebecca to make sure it’s okay. And yes, she liked the idea. So Nezhla and I set to work, emptying numerous baskets for the job.

Notice all the baskets! Had we gotten to it on the day it was pointed out that we should, many more flowers would not have already lost their pollen (all the darker ones).

We ended up with only two baskets, one full, one not.

Meanwhile, however, Nezhla noticed tent caterpillar webs on the bush, and said we needed to burn them, or they would take over the entire tree. “How do you know?” I asked. “Because that’s what happened to my mom when I was a kid.”

So I cut off the branches. And on the way to burning them, was interrupted by Shy (David), who is doing the improvements at the new DeKist house; he remarked, “Why not see if the chickens will eat the caterpillars?” So we tried.

“Here chick chick! ” he called out. But they didn’t take the bait. “Well, I guess then I’ll torch them,” he concluded.

Poor worms! “Torture,” as he pointed out. Reminded me of Vietnam.

Meanwhile, I was at the monthly permie guild meeting at the library last night downtown at the library. Rhonda Baird, permaculture teacher, designer and, recently, facilitator for this revived group and who now wants us to step up to the plate and co-facilitate, asked us to bring recipes. She did. She was the only one who did. But I took a picture of this one, which just happens to fit with today’s elderberry theme. Of course, as she pointed out, “the recipe is mostly lemons and sugar.” Oops. Can we make it with honey?

We did agree to hold two work party/potlucks for our next two monthly meetings at two urban farms nearby that meeting participants run. I think Rhonda can finally give up her facilitator job, for which she is grateful, and we, in turn, are ever grateful for her patience as the group finally jelled after, what has it been, five months?

Okay, back at our own urban farm, the Green Acres Village:

Early this afternoon I finally got around to doing another of the tasks Rebecca had assigned me, “putting up” food. To this end I picked lots of kale from one astonishingly productive hugelkultur bed (the trunk from a huge elm molders inside it) in the main garden and will freeze, after briefly steaming and cooling, then wrapping in wax paper either single servings or larger, before placing in plastic bags.

And Logan and Dan finally got around to one of their assigned tasks: planting beans, five kinds, Dan tells me: black, zuni gold, red swan, portal jade, and some kind of butter pea.

Some flowers currently gracing our beautiful land . . .

What are these? I’ll have to send a pic to Rebecca . . .

Here’s what’s loving one of our (original) Garden Towers: nasturtiums! So full, the tower is invisible.

I planted these next to the pond maybe five years ago, from a Green Acres Neighborhood plant swap. Didn’t know what I was doing at the time. But they did! And this is the year they really started to thrive.

Finally, I wondered about this plant, thinking maybe Rebecca would consider it a weed, because there’s sure plenty of it! I was all ready to step into my role as weed excavator. Took a pic and sent it to her, just to make sure.

NO! Those are goji berry plants!

Whew! Thank goodness I asked.

Here’s what the berries are supposed to look like.