An organic volunteer garden in Mountain View.
Check out our new Soil&Water Sign. Andra McFarlane was the awesome artist that designed this sign. Jason Kihl, a metal artist, cut this sign out of metal for us and drove it out from Arizona to hand deliver it to the garden. Thank you both for all your work on this. It looks pretty amazing in the space!
Ever grown amaranth in your garden? It turns out it is pretty easy to grow and is fairly drought tolerant. It is a hardy, high yield producing grain. The leaves and the seeds are edible. Young tender leaves are best for flavor and can be used as you would spinach or kale. The seeds can be soaked overnight and cooked as additions to cereals or with other grains. I personally like to grind it into a flour and add some to anything I am baking. It adds a nice nutty flavor. The grain is high in protein, B-6, and some key minerals like iron and magnesium.
I thought this would be a great addition to the Soil&Water garden to see it growing and participate in harvesting it too.
During our workdays last week we threshed and winnowed some amaranth to plant in the garden. This particular variety, rainbow amaranth, was originally shared with us by Common Ground Garden in Palo Alto. Soil&Water grew it at Viola’s garden (a former backyard garden) and had held on to it for just such an opportunity.
Last Wednesday, we took the dried stalks and threshed it using a hardware cloth mesh. Threshing simply means to separate the seed from the stalk. That was as straightforward as rubbing your hands across it.
To winnow (separate the seed from the chaff), we used a couple of bowls and allowed air to assist in the process. We didn’t need it to be too clean since we were just going to plant it.
Seeds can stay viable for quite awhile so fingers crossed this seed grows because the seeds have been sitting around for some time.
We broadcast the seed across one of the beds to plant it during Saturday’s workday.
This was a fun activity at the garden. There was some debate about whether all varieties of amaranth are edible but after some Google searching it appears that most varieties are edible. So consider including amaranth in your garden this summer and try it out. At the very least, it makes an interesting looking flower!
If you’ve visited the Soil&Water garden, you might be wondering why we created a layout with mixed edibles in small rows.
“What’s the philosophy behind small-scale garden rows, anyway?”
I thought it would be a nice way for people visiting the garden to consider ideas for planting edibles mixed together in a small space. If you have limited planting space at home – and who doesn’t?! – how would you plant it? There are a ton of cool ideas out there for small garden plots, container gardening, even vertical gardens. (Check out this article on 16 cool raised bed designs from Sunset.com.)
Our small-scale garden layout is based on an article from Sunset Gardens that plants mixed edibles in a 16′ x 16′ plot which came down to two main beds 11′ x 3′ approximately with beans and sunflowers along a back fence.
In the Soil&Water garden, our garden rows are 3′ wide already so where two rows come to an apex was perfect to mimic the same idea. Thus I used their model for planting our small scale garden ‘plot’ with mixed edibles.
Another reason this is a nice method is because you can consider companion plants, natural pest deterrents, even pollinator attractants in the plantings. I modified the design slightly based on veggies that made it on our planting list.
The small scale garden was planted pretty early in the season (for stuff like tomatoes, squash, and eggplant) so another thing this will provide is a comparison of how these crops do with an early planting vs. regular suggested time.
A lot if you hold a garden egg hunt. Yesterday, April 12, kids hunted for eggs around Heritage park and found seeds hidden in some of them (and candy too!, of course). One of the main seeds they found were Petaluma Gold Rush beans. A variety that Soil&Water has been asked to grow for the Silicon Valley Grows seed bank.
Silicon Valley Grows has an annual project where gardeners in the community all grow the same seed. The 2018 project is the Petaluma Gold Rush bean and we are excited to participate in growing some this season. We’ll get to try them out and save seeds for the seed bank. In fact, they may be available next year through the Mountain View public library’s free seed library. If you don’t know about this great resource, the public library has a seed library where you can go and take seeds for your personal use for free.
Join us tomorrow, Saturday, March 25, 2017 at Soil&Water Garden in Mountain View to learn about sustainable grains and wheat planting.
Monica Spiller from Whole Grain Connection will be giving a talk about sustainable grains and then we’ll plant some wheat.
We look forward to seeing you at the garden!
🌱
All the structure for the garden is nearly complete. This means things are right on schedule and we’ll be able to start planting the garden as early as this coming Saturday. Thanks to everyone for your hard work and especially to Eva from the Google Community Gardens for her help!
This past Saturday was bed building day. To prepare for this day, I ordered all the redwood pre-cut from the Home Depot. They were so helpful by pre-cutting the wood and delivering it to Heritage park. The list of wood I ordered with all the requested cuts was asking a lot of them but they made it easy with very few errors so thank you Home Depot. Having it delivered was especially a good choice too.
We also ordered soil (the CK mix) from Ciaradella’s, which is organic and contains mushroom and organic compost. This particular one came highly recommended from Eva.
Then we had several people bring drills, tools, and wheelbarrows to build day. On Saturday, we got to work. Some people shoveling dirt into wheelbarrows and bringing it over to the garden, some assembling the wood and drilling, and some with the important job of keeping an eye on the kids. Even the kids got to work filling buckets with dirt and what fun they had playing on a huge mound of dirt. By the end of two hours, we successfully assembled all the beds with some adjustments to the specs to decrease the potential for wood rot. Thanks to Tod, Jose and Eva for all their advice and expertise in the process. The rest of us learned a lot. Check out a few pictures from the workday.
The community garden space is coming together and we’ll be ready to plant soon. This weekend, we’ll be building the raised beds for the garden space at Soil&Water Garden and could use your help. No experience is necessary, we’ll guide you through it.
Our friends at Google will be bringing their expertise in raised bed building bringing lots of volunteers to help. We’ll provide all the materials and some snacks too. We hope that you’ll join us!
Last Saturday and Wednesday, we worked on creating irrigation in the garden. Orchard Supply Hardware helped out with their expertise and everyone that came out learned quite a bit about installing a system. We laid underground pvc with risers that will eventually supply water to drip irrigation tubes at each bed.
The first volunteer workday was a huge success! We are in awe at all the excited volunteers that have come out and gotten involved. We had planned several things for this workday and finished all of it in the first 40 minutes. So we continued digging….. until we laid out all the in-ground beds in only 2 hours. Check out some photos from this workday.
The new urban demonstration garden at Heritage Park in Mountain View is just getting started. We’ll be meeting every Saturday morning this month to create the garden design plan. The first meet up is this coming Sat, January 7, 2017 at 10 AM. We’d like to invite you to come out and provide your creative ideas for a garden. The space is one long football shaped space. Right now it is just soil and mulch. Here are a few photos of what the garden currently looks like. The three wood beds next to the Immigrant house are a kitchen herb garden and will be planted with herbs. The rest of the space (2200 sq ft) is for edibles and is yet to be created.
