Mid-July update!

Somehow it's the middle of July already - does the summer seem to be going by as quickly for the rest of you as it is for me? As we're all going about our summer adventures, the RC garden is becoming a pretty exciting place!

The sunflower plants in Tyler's plot are finally blooming...




The first of the tomatoes are starting to ripen (these are Matthew's)...




The summer squash in the second bed are growing...




The bell pepper plants in the first bed have some small peppers coming...




The corn in the second bed is getting rather tall, and there are quite a few basil and cilantro plants growing beneath it...




The tomato plants of different varieties that Talisha & Co. planted in the first bed are LOADED with fruits! I wish I knew its name, but this is one variety in that bed when the fruits are both small and large...




Sometime in the last few days, a mystery helper came by and cut down a lot of the weeds that were growing in the area around the beds. Whoever it was, THANK YOU! It's so much easier to walk around the west end of the beds now. This person also picked a lot of the yellowing cucumbers in the ENVI 200 class section (which I had no clue what to do with). I found them lined up along the bed like so:




There's also a new addition to the garden that might catch your eye if you stop by. I am hanging around Roanoke this summer doing research with Dr. O'Neill, and the project we're working on involves using a compost pile as a test bed for the method we'd like to use on agricultural soil. Thus we needed to set up a small pile. Although composting can be done by simply piling up compostable materials on the ground, we decided to purchase a barrel-shaped tumbling compost bin. We think it's a little nicer to look at than a pile of decomposing material, though I suppose you all can be the judge of that...




The composter is currently in the grassy area below the garden beds within the electric fence. Once we get the raw materials into the barrel, we'll have to ask that nobody adds anything without asking us, since we'll need to do tests on the decomposing materials throughout the process. The finished product can be used in the garden, though.

Talisha Beha told me this week that she plans to come by on Wednesday mornings to harvest whatever is ripe and deliver it to the food bank. From what I saw today, she'll have an armful of cucumbers (not the yellow ones, haha), summer squash, and zucchini to deliver this week. In a week or two, there will also be lots of tomatoes and potatoes. How exciting!

Now if only we would get a little rain to make pulling weeds easier...

~ Kim