By Jasmine Shi

Sign up to join a guided work party here! No experience necessary and all are welcome.

We had a productive day today at the garden! 

Angela brought over four lavender plants that were donated to us. 

We had some harvest of collard greens, lettuce, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and the last of the beans for this year!

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. 

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! 

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.