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!

• Where: Heritage Park Garden, 771 N. Rengstorff,  Mountain View, CA 94043
• When: Saturday, March 18, 2017, 10AM – Noon

 

 

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.  

We finished up designing the garden space and can’t wait to share the design with you! 

Thank you to Matt M for putting this final model together, and to the many people on the design committee for volunteering your time and effort over the past month to put this together.  

This model will serve as a plan of our garden layout for this first year. This layout kept the planter boxes to a minimum and maximized the in-ground planting areas.  In total, we have approximately 1000 square feet of plantable area, including all beds and boxes.

To help you navigate the models:

• Center octagonal ,two-tiered planting bed, approx 8′ wide
• A compost area to the right side and kid’s garden area to the left side.  (These are still in flux)
• One main entrance and 1 or 2 exits near the compost area for easy access to the tool shed and picnic table.
• Main path into the garden is 3′ wide
• In-ground beds are 3′ wide. 
• Mulch walking paths,  2′ wide (just wide enough to garden from both sides) No obvious throughways but more indirect access paths with a main cross path to avoid excess traffic through the garden
• A simple post and wire fence to encompass the garden
• Compost box – a configuration of three compost bins and worm bin.

This plan provides a pretty informative visualization of the size of the space and what can fit in it.  Keep in mind that it serves as an excellent guideline but will be modified as needed upon implementation in the garden.  

Hope you are as excited about it as the design committee is!

Next steps: 
Jason took a soil sample and submitted it for analysis. 

Matt, Kathleen, Jason, Archana, Heather, Tod, Ronit, and Kavita began laying out the model on the ground based on this plan.  

A plant list has been drafted and will be completed over beers at Bierhaus this coming Sunday.  
You all are invited to come for a beer or provide input on what edibles you want to have growing at the garden.

• Where: Bierhaus, 383 Castro St, Mountain View, CA
• When: Sunday, Feb 12, 2017
• Time: 3-4:30pm

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.