Baldy View Garden News - 2011

Hi There to all of you garden followers! We had a great year in the garden club but I was so busy that I never remembered to post the news to this blogsite. Alec Heir and his family were so kind as to donate (a beautiful houseplant to me!) and a Home Depot gift card to the garden. We will have to put it to good use for tools to help our garden grow. Thank you Alec! The 5th graders helped to earn about $100.00 for our seed fund through recycling! Thank you 5th graders, you're awesome and so are your teachers for giving you the time to help our school to do what's right and recycle. Speaking of recycling, our rainwater capture barrel works really well thanks to our district groundsmen. They had to work with it to make it fit our downspout but they figured out an ingenious adapter and it has captured several barrels of water off the roof rain run-off this past year. We will use this water to water the garden during the summer months.





Here's a brief update on what we did this past year:





Fall session - We worked on a lot of weeding and planting wildflower seeds. We made accordian books about our native state bird (Quail), tree (Redwood/Sequoia), and flower (Ca. Poppy). We also made some tomatillo salsa verde before we pulled up the tomatillos. The 8-10 navel oranges someone picked from our tree were great.





Winter session - We had Christian, from Upland High School government class, come to help us in the garden. He helped us plant Rhubarb, onions, and Chayote Squash and we also cooked up some Chayote with stewed vegetables from the garden. We made fresh lemonade and then we used the lemon skins as a mini-pot to plant squash and corn seeds in. We transplanted some of our wildflower seedlings from the session before - unfortunately the frost or something got to those seedlings and many did not make it through to Spring. We also weeded a lot and watched the blueberries we had planted last year flower out!





Spring session - Again, we had Christian and his friend Luis come help us in the garden! The students really seem to enjoy having some young adults come and show interest in our farming attempts. This year we have been fortunate to have some very able students that were just as interested in growing things as we are. We planted the seedlings from last session (lemon rind and all) and, when school closed down in June, the squash and corn were growing fine. We planted some peanuts, marigold companion plants (to repel bugs) and some tomatoes and bell peppers. Luis and Christian taught Mrs. Sorvetti about a traditional hibiscus flower tea/punch called "Jamaica". I had to try it, so we made some and almost everyone loved it! I'm trying to find out if we can grow the specific plant here in So. Cal. This session we were able to harvest our abundant blueberries and strawberries and we cooked them up with some rhubarb. It made sort of a hot fruit compote that we poured over cupcakes that we made using fresh eggs from Mrs. Sorvetti's chickens! Yum! Oh, and by the way, the Chayote squash is growing and so are the peanuts and the rhubarb! I am happy to report that after about 1 and 1/2 years wait we are finally seeing the pigeon peas set fruit! The bush is taller than we are!





The composting bin was full at the end of the school year with beautiful rich compost ready to use. And to think, it was going to be part of a landfill but the cafeteria ladies worked diligently with the students to make sure that our garbage was recycled into the compost bin. Our worms were doing really well, so I donated them to another school garden, Redeemer Lutheran, that is just getting started in Ontario.





Have a great summer! Happy Gardening and Healthy Eating to all!