Well, today was another huge day! We’re hurting pretty good, but we at least have something significant to show for it! Our community garden is now 98% finished!
It was a good day at the Fairbanks Community Garden! This is our ninth season here and it was good to see both familiar and new faces alike! We always enjoy working to the buzz of tillers, people chatting about their gardens and observing people putting in the work to produce their own food! If this is your first year year, let us give you a hearty welcome! It’s a great garden with great people working hard to make it a fantastic place to grow!
We did, unfortunately, lie to you all yesterday. We said we were going to hold off on planting our squash, but our forecast said otherwise. We decided to take the risk, with lows of 40 degrees predicted into the next weekend, taking us well past our average last frost date. This risk is always a calculated decision every season, it was a risk worth taking this year.
You’ll sometimes find this with us. We have so called “principles” around our practices, but we also operate based on the information we have available to us at the time. Yesterday, I was set on waiting until next weekend to plant our squash. Then, this morning, I “internalized” that we were well past our risk of frost and between the two of us, we decided to take the risk and move forward.
For some plants, extra time in the ground makes a difference in maturity. Squash is one of those where it matters. While a week doesn’t “seem” like much, we’ll be two weeks ahead of those who take a more conservative approach and wait until early June to plant. (That is, if we are correct and avoid frosts, of course!)
We also got our seed potatoes into the ground, which is always a monumental task of moving ground. These are very cold climate friendly, and in all honesty, we could have planted them two weeks ago. But, with potatoes, we really don’t see any advantages to planting earlier, so we just do it when it’s convenient.
And lastly, we got our climbing peas and beans are now direct sowed! This was a much more involved effort this year as we also had planned to repair our trellis. The winter months take their toll on any kind of non-structural build in our climate, like our trellis, and some hacky repairs were well overdue. We installed a top rail to our trellis, which should give us some much needed stability. Fortunately, it looks better from afar than it does up close. That’s OK, we learned long ago plants don’t care about level, straight or properly fastened! LOL.
We’re down to six more plants at this garden! We’re waiting on a bit more maturity before we transplant. But, we can jam them in when we’re there to water. It’s feeling really good to have this garden almost entirely done, we’re going to pull a massive amount of food from it!
