June's Community Work Day - Planting!

It is beginning to look like a garden around here now!  We got a lot accomplished today during the June Community Work Day!  I always find the next week or two very exciting because the garden starts to take shape as everything is planted and all the extras, like stakes, irrigation, cages, etc. are placed and waiting for plants to grow. 

I purchased a new rain gauge and have placed it at the head of the Beet and Swiss Chard row.  Now I just need to wait for a nice rain so I can record how much water is falling on the plants.  I've always loved tracking rain fall, even as a young child growing up, it fascinated me that you could measure rain fall.

Today I had over 25 people show up for the Community Work Day to help finish planting the rest of the garden.  We planted all the seedlings that were donated.  I was not going to plant watermelon this year, but someone donated some seedlings.  I was going to plant potatoes here, but there were no potatoes left at Big Acre, so these watermelon are now planted in Row 1 where potatoes were originally going to be.

We also planted a bunch of tomato plants in my old and fairly ragged landscape fabric.  (I think this is the last year for this piece!) I just noticed in this photo how very crooked this row is; the wind was so strong when we laid out the irrigation lines that we could not keep them straight.  Even tacking down the lines with landscape staples did not stop the wind from blowing the lines around on the top of the little hill here.  That's OK, the plants will grow just as well in a creative crooked row as they would in a straight row.

 Here are the cabbage plants.  I might try using row covers on these guys this summer.  I have to make arrangements to pick up a row cover from the DTE gardens, but I think it would be fun to try a new technology.  And the quality of the cabbage would improve too, so even more reason to try it!

We also planted peppers and eggplants, but my photo of these little guys doesn't show them up very well.  Even I am having a hard time finding the little seedlings.  So here is a photo of the Yellow Squash; nothing exciting to see because we planted seeds here.  Soon I will post a shot of the plants as they pop up out of the ground.

It was a very productive work day, and I want to thank all the volunteers that came out to help finish up my spring planting!