Community Garden

It's been a slow start, but the garden is beginning to produce. Today we brought home one each of our three varieties of zucchini, a couple of green tomatoes, a few peppers and the sunflowers, of course.

There are blossoms on the tomatoes, so it's about time we provided some support. We put up the few cages we had, and some stakes, but we'll have to set up something stronger. I read about stringing twine between sturdy stakes and training the plants along the twine. That might do it.

The squash and melons sprouts are nearly ready for thinning, and the beans are making their first appearance. It looks like it will be a good year.

At last I ordered seeds for the garden. I spent much too much time looking on various websites, trying to find everything I wanted for the vegetable garden. I was hoping to be able to find a single local supplier with lots of inexpensive, organic, heirloom varieties for each vegetable I wanted. A little unrealistic. I began to panic when I started to fill shopping carts on two different websites and then received a notice that they were not accepting additional orders due to unexpectedly high demand. Years ago in Salisbury, I had ordered from Shepherd's Seeds and had been very happy.

In 2007 we had our first experience in community gardening, with a plot at Swarthmore, which turned out to be fairly successful, overall.

We finished up the planting at our garden plot today, setting the seed purchased weeks before. The plot is divided into roughly three equal sections, crosswise, with the tomatoes in the center section.