By Jasmine Shi
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We had a productive day today at the garden!
Angela brought over four lavender plants that were donated to us.
Two of the four lavender plants in their new home in the xeriscape bed
We had some harvest of collard greens, lettuce, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and the last of the beans for this year!
Today’s harvest
Harvesting the cucumbers
In addition to the harvest, we also dug up the last of the potatoes — we had four kilograms!! After that, the bed was reformed in preparation for garlic planting next week.
We had four kilograms of potatoes.
Digging up the potatoes
Since the bean plants were at the end of their lives, we took down the bean poles and laid the plant foliage on the bed to act as mulch. We took care to cut off the foliage from the roots at the soil level instead of pulling up the roots since beans are nitrogen fixers and their roots contain nutritious nitrogen which we want to keep in the soil!
The bean bed
Alex told us about saving seeds from Brassica — more commonly known as cruciferous vegetables — and how important it is to grow different varieties separately, especially if you want to keep the seeds of a particular variety. If you don’t, different varieties will cross pollinate and make hybrid offspring!
Today Alex brought a large quantity of collard green seeds which a team of willing volunteers separated from their husks.
Alex and the collard green seeds in their husks
