By Jasmine Shi

It’s great to see a fair number of people showing up for gardening even at the tail end of the season, in cold November! Today was the second-to-last week for gardening at Riley Park, and there were still surprisingly many tasks to be done. 

We received some indigenous plants, including Nootka rose, goldenrod, and wapato. Some were transplanted to the garden beds while others were shared among the volunteers to be taken home. 

A few volunteers took big forks and helped to reshape the last vegetable bed in the garden, which was starting to look wild. They did a very neat job.

Our elderberry shrub tree was pruned and the leftover branches were used to make a cute-looking border at the end of our edible food forest.

We received a few bags of fall leaves and they were sprinkled on top of the shrubs in the food forest to act as mulch over the winter.

We transplanted a few raspberry plants that had been living in pots to sit beside the already-existing raspberries. Apparently these are a more voraciously growing variety 🤔

Lastly, we harvested the horseradish plant from the herb bed by digging up its roots. Something interesting that Amy, who is Japanese, shared is that the wasabi paste bought in stores is essentially 90% horseradish and only 10% wasabi. This is because it is so hard to grow wasabi, and horseradish thrives much better in our soil.