Rainbow Community Garden Update #1

April 1, 2009

In this issue:

1. Mark your calendars

2. Garden overview

3. What to plant?

4. What’s next?

5. News and resource list

1. Mark your calendars — Aaron Barnhart

This community garden effort emerged from the study group of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle at Rainbow Church. We’re preparing a modest amount of land in a vacant lot the church owns on Mill Street. As you will see from this newsletter, we are planning carefully.

We hope you can join us for planting day on Saturday, April 25, at the Rainbow Community Garden, 2340 S. Mill.

This newsletter will be issued about once a month and will summarize activity around the garden. At the end of each issue will be news and a list of resources to help you grow and buy food and other products locally.

If you are interested in helping plan and raise this new community garden, please contact Diane at diane.eickhoff@gmail.com.

2. Garden overview — Diane Eickhoff

It’s April! Time to start gathering the materials we need for our garden: seeds, fertilizer, compost/mulch, and people power.

We’ve agreed on the following:

A. We want to put “community” in our community garden.

and

B. We want to make sure the garden is carefully tended.

To balance these two, we’ve decided to plan the garden together, help each other when needed, and share the harvest with others. A planning group agreed that to help us achieve our goal of tending the space properly, we’ll divide the garden into six beds of about 100 SF apiece and assign six individuals or couples to be responsible for each section. I’m calling these individuals “bed captains” (anyone got a better name?).

Bed captains would be responsible for seeing that their section is weeded and watered and for staying alert to any bug or animal problems that might occur. Obviously, watering is one task we might want to organize collectively, and bugs or animals will not pay much attention to whose section they are in … but you get the point.

We invite anyone in the church or community to partner with us, and indeed we are in IMMEDIATE need of a sixth bed captain. We encourage bed captains to ask for help when they need it, and to recruit as much help as they can. Most of us will be away for some part of the summer, but knowing we are responsible for a section means we have to make sure that — one way or another — our section gets the care it needs throughout the growing season.

Our tentative list of bed captains includes:

Chris Alliman and Elizabeth Carlson

Tanya Ortman and Ky Stoltzfus

Ken and Carrie Parsons

Diane and Aaron

Justin Petkau

As for the sixth bed, until we find a volunteer to oversee it, all hands on deck.

3. What to Plant? — Diane

Part 1: Ever since we started talking about a community garden, we have been kicking around ideas on what to plant. We talked initially about planting vegetables that require more space but were told melons of all kinds are fussy and require more water. Corn and pumpkins takes a lot of space, and our designated area is fairly small. And it may be a little late to get potatoes in the ground.

Part 2: Last week I talked to both the Wyandotte and Johnson County extension agents. They advised us to concentrate in our first year at just getting the enterprise going and to select the most common, easy-to-grow crops -- tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, sweet potatoes, okra, Swiss chard, and lettuces -- the last two are spring crops & could be followed by a summer crop. Chelsea at Johnson County Extension office advised against carrots or beets the first year b/c they need lots of wiggle room & our soil will be more dense than it will be in future years.

Part 3: So, what do we plant? Look at this list of planting times from K-State , so at least we know when something should go in the ground and when not. In the next week, let's nail down a list. If you'd like to try something different or even something that may not be "ideal" but you are really longing to try, suggest it! If you want to stick with the suggested list of vegetables mentioned above, that's cool too. Circulate your choices to the whole list. If we have approximately 6 plots 10x8 or 8x8' we could probably easily incorporate a dozen different vegetables -- like 2 vegetables per plot -- maybe more. Instead of ordering seeds or seedlings as a large group, we could do BYOS (Bring Your Own Seeds -- or Seedlings) on Planting Day, April 25. I have extra seeds to share and can get 10 more packets of seeds free from Kansas City Community Garden (part of our membership) -- all of which we won't need for our own little backyard garden. But if you want to get assuredly organic seeds, you or we need to order these asap.

Part 4: This just in from K-State: our soil test report. I sent in two soil samples, one from the area we plan to garden (requesting advice for vegetable soil) and one from behind the arbor (requesting advice on growing grapes -- probably not this year but maybe next?). The reports are attached at the end of this newsletter (the report for grapes is in purple!).

Because of the high pH in the soil, the report recommends that we “add 3 pounds of sulfur per 100 SF to bring soil to an optimum pH.”

As a result of the high potassium and phosphate levels in our soil, we will need to rethink the fertilizer. We were planning on using “zoo-doo,” but if we want to follow their recommendations and get more nitrogen into our garden w/o adding phosphorus and potassium, we need Plan B. Unfortunately, the suggested fertilizers on the soil test report are not recommended for organic gardening.

This Missouri Extension publication identifies blood meal, cottonseed meal, and fish emulsion as high-nitrogen organic fertilizers. (Corn gluten is also high in nitrogen — but expensive.)

4. What’s next?

The AVM e-mail list, which was set up for discussing the book, now is the main discussion forum for the gardeners when they can’t get together in person. In the coming days we will be hashing out the upcoming things-that-need-to-get-done. So if you’re not on that list, and want to be part of the gardening effort, please let Diane know (diane.eickhoff@gmail.com).

• We need to pick up load or two of compost from the Deramus site. The church truck is available; we need volunteers.

• Decide what to plant and order seeds

• Decide what fertilizer to get and how much

• Begin planning Planting Day

5.  News and resource list

EAT LOCAL! KC Food Circle EXPO

Saturday, April 4, 2009 — 9:15 am to 2:00 pm

Roger T. Sermon Community Center

Truman & Noland Rd., Independence, Missouri

(1 ½ miles west of US 291)

FREE Workshop at both sites starting at 9:30am: “How to Buy Local - CSA’s and Organic Farmers Markets”

For more info call KC Food Circle @ 913-334-0556 — Free Admission http://www.KCFoodCircle.org

Buying Locally

CSA info and general resource website: Kansas City Food Circle http://www.kcfoodcircle.org/

Eggs and poultry: The Campo Lindo Farms website has a long list of restaurants that prepare foods with their chicken and eggs.

Grain: Soaring Eagle Farms — Certified Organic Grain and Flour — http://www.acmegrain.com/

Eating Locally: Restaurants serving local foods

The American Restaurant

Aixois

Blue Bird Bistro

Bluestem

Cafe des Amis

Café Sebastienne at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

The Carriage Club

Cassis Bistro

City Tavern

The Classic Cup Cafe

Eden Alley

40 Sardines

Justus Drug Store - a restaurant (Smithville, MO)

The Kansas City Club

Lidia’s Kansas City

Local Burger (Lawrence, KS coming soon to Overland Park!)

Room 39

Starker’s Reserve