A big Thank You to all the Garden Fairies!

Eight garden beds are built and in place! Thank you to Joe Fedorko for 3 hours in the cold and damp today building perfectly straight beds for our Salad Gardens.

A big thanks to the Cring family for donating the wood we used today. Corry Lawler has also donated some boards for the spring to finish the side beds.

Mrs. Robbins brought fabulous manure. My friends Karen and Phil brought hay and apple sludge. Steve Flynn is bringing spent grain from the brewpub. The Village crew brought dirt and leaves, and Kris Dimmick spent 3 hours helping mow those leaves, not to mention bringing me the mowers and the gas.

The guys at the school have helped hammer in posts and move big piles of leaves. The Miller women helped shovel and cart dirt. Carmel and Nicki hustled rotting jack o lanterns and brought coffee grounds. Sharon Murray raked and shovelled one day and turned the chaos into piles and paths.

We will be looking for more garden fairies (people who make wishes come true!) and garden gnomes (people who will help watch over the garden) in the future. Let me know if you are interested in becoming a 4-H leader or helping with the garden in any way.

We are in the process of setting up the beds for the garden

I chose a project called "Seed to Salad" that I found on the Garden based Learning section on the Cornell Cooperative extension website. Each 4H member will get a 3x3 square of garden. They will design salad gardens to mimic quilt block patterns, or maybe a design of their own choosing. We will plant cool weather crops that can be harvested by the end of the year (lettuce, spinach, beets, carrots, swiss chard, green onions) and have a salad party.

Because the planting will start in early April, we needed to have the beds ready for spring. I don't know if any of you have tried to dig a garden at the end of March, but it is pretty muddy. And if you till a patch when it is wet, you actually will compact the soil.

Instead of tilling the ground where the garden will be, I chose to take advantage of the large quantity of dried leaves available in the fall and try a method call sheet composting or "lasagna gardening" where you layer different organic materials in thin layers alternating with soil, and by spring, you should have beds that are fully decomposed and ready to plant.

The ideal ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen in a compost pile is 30:1. Leaves are higher in carbon (high carbons are referred to as "browns"), so you need to alternate them with higher nitrogen materials (called "greens") like coffee grounds, manure, grass clippings, and vegetable peelings. Besides using the leaves to build the raised beds, I am hoarding the leaves to use as mulch, and to have an adequate source of "browns" to balance out the "greens" in the summer compost.

We still need more sources of greens to balance out the browns. Mrs Robbins brought beautiful aged manure from her farm, but we need to get more.