An organic volunteer garden in Mountain View.
The Heritage Park grand opening was this past Saturday, Dec 10, 2016. It was pouring down rain but there were still loads of people attending!! (and for gardeners, rain is a good sign) The park is a beautiful and unique space from the historic Immigrant house to the fruit trees, demonstration garden, and home for the bees. If you haven’t had the chance to see it for yourself, stop by and take a stroll. Thank you City of Mountain View for creating this space for all of us to enjoy.
Exciting news!!!
Soil&Water was awarded the urban shared garden at the newest city park, Heritage park (771 Rengstorff). The park is officially scheduled to open December 10, 2016 with a ribbon cutting ceremony from 11am-12noon. After that, Soil&Water can begin designing, building and gardening there.
http://www.mountainview.gov/events/default.asp?ViewBy=7&CalDate=12/10/2016&EventDateID=22415
The park is amazing. The city will have it all set up for us, we just go in and start planting. Create beds, irrigation, etc. There are a couple trees perfect for gathering areas. The garden itself is one large football shaped space. They are planting the area near it with sensory stuff like lavender and rosemary. There is a patio area that will have a storage/tool shed. There is another patio area surrounding the immigrant house that is right near the garden area so thinking cooking demos on the patio.
This community garden is intended as a shared space where anyone interested is welcome to get involved. We’re just getting started and are actively looking for volunteers. If you have an hour a month or a few hours a week, we’d love to have you be a part of this. You don’t need to have gardening experience. Learn more at soilandwatergarden.org. If interested, come join our group and definitely come to the opening event on Dec 10th @Heritage park.
See you all there!
Soil and Water has been Gardening since March at this new site and have been exciting to see the growth of each plant. We had planned in such a way that there is a Common space gardening and 8 individual plots for the gardening.
In the Common space we planted bunch of tomatoes with different varieties. We picked many different types like Roma, Green, Cluster, Vine, Heriloom and Cherry yellow and red tomatoes. It’s so exciting to see them grow and produce bunch of tomatoes.
In the plot we have planted Tomato, Peppers, Zucchini,Eggplants, Cucumbers, Fennel, Onions and Chili.
We have started getting bunch of Zucchini and Cucumbers coming out. It tastes so awesome and fresh. We have also started harvesting tomatoes and they are so juicy and red in color.
These planting and harvest are totally organic without any pesticides and sprays.
These are few pictures from our garden and will look forward to see more post on the harvest.
Soil&Water is pleased to have our first Backyard Gardeners network site in Mountain View. We have named this site as Iwai Garden. Iwai and his family have shared their backyard with Soil&Water to work on this project.
This is an exciting opportunity for us to start with Summer Gardening. Here the space will be distributed with Individual plots for interested people who needs a space to plant and enjoy gardening. This garden will also have shared areas where the area will be done by Volunteers. This is an exciting opportunity for people without Backyard and Patio.
S&W is excited to design and plant for this growing season. We have completed setting up Drip irrigation to the plots and have planted few herbs and Tomatoes to start with. We also have setup Bean Tepee and are planning on planting beans or Cucumbers for the season.
Kids love to come to the Garden and help us plant and also play around with the chickens, Swings and play area around there.
Kids love to play around the water area while irrigating the plants. We have setup Drip irrigation in all the shared and Individual plots.
The nets around the plots are for the chicken. They are Chicken nets and we had to handle them due to baby plants.
There is a huge Walnut tree with swings. Kids love to spend their time in the swing with the chickens around.
If you are interested in volunteering with Soil&Water Please contact us.
In the month of April 2015, Mountain View celebrated 37th Annual Spring parade. Soil and water was a part of the parade along with Kiwanis. We were really excited to be a part of the parade.
This year the theme was “Around the World in Mountain View”! The parade will began at noon on Castro Street at Villa Street and continued all the way into Pioneer Park for crafts, games, music and fun. It was a family event.
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In the month of April 2015, Soil&Water visited Google for a Bee tour. Thank you Google beekeepers for inviting us to the campus and sharing your knowledge of beekeeping. We are really very thankful to Google for their support and collaboration with Soil&Water. They have also funded the Soil&Water Gardening project and are supporting us so many ways. Google has been so welcoming to us.
The Bee tour was arranged for kids to show them whole process of honey making. The tour with Google @Google campus was scheduled on April 2nd 2015 @ 1530hrs. It was a one hour tour and was very informative for all of us. The kids got to learn about the process of making honey and explore the surroundings.
Kids love honey and also very curious to know ‘how bees make honey?’ and ‘What equipment is used to go near the Hive?’ ”What is the use of wearing a suite?’ and at last they all got to taste the fresh, pure and natural honey. We could even see different colors of Honey formed from various types of flowers.
Honey Bees collect pollen and nectar from many types of flowers and stores this in their stomach to carry to the Bee hive. They use their long tongue to take the nectar from various flowers. After storing in stomach for a while, It drops (essentially spits) the honey into the Bee-wax comb which is usually hexagonal shaped cells and made of wax formed by bees. They repeat this process until the Bee-wax comb is full. Once its full and honey is collected it is ready for harvesting. This process is so amazingly perfect (take another look at the photo of the hive).
Beekeepers wear a protective suit to go near the hive. The kids got to see and have explained to them how to wear this suit. Google keeps four hives.
The second thing they need is a ‘Smoker’. Bee keepers use a smoker to visit the Bee hive in order to prevent them from stinging. A smoker is a tool to blow smoke into the beehive before inspecting. It consists of a fire pot and nozzle. During the tour, the bee keeper asked the kids to fill the fire pot with some dried leaves and the bee keeper closed the lid and lit the fire and smoke came out through the nozzle. This is used because smoke alerts the bees to move further down in the hive (they sense danger and so move inward to protect themselves) so that a beekeeper can safely access the hive without disturbing the bees.
Finally, we were lucky enough to have the bees share some of their yummy honey with us. The kids got to break the delicate honey-filled comb to sample wonderful honey. We could see different layers and different colors of honey formation. These variations in color are due to the type of nectar the bees gather. All the kids fell in love with it and the whole tour was spectacular. Once finished, the beekeepers replace the frame into the hive and the bees will simply continue to refill the honey and rebuild the comb. Amazing!
In February Soil&Water arranged a tour with Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale. The tour explored the farm and youth garden where the kids played in dirt piles, discovered worms in the compost and fed chickens. Full Circle Farm is a great local farm in our area that teaches kids about growing food, our local food systems, and sustainable garden practices. Kids were really happy to join the tour and run around in the farm. If interested, their kid’s tours take approximately 1 1/2 hours and adult tours show the whole farm in detail which usually takes more than 2-3 hours. They have many ways to volunteer including drop-in volunteer workdays on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 10am until whenever your feel like leaving.
Soil&Water usually plans monthly Kid’s events. If you’d like to join any of our future events, send an email to soilandwatergarden@gmail.com
We were really astonished to see a huge farm in the heart of the Sunnyvale. They showed us the full farm and detailed tour about their complete process from seedlings in Green house to harvesting the vegetables. The Green house space was huge and lot of varieties of seedlings growing in there.
The other crops like Radish,Kale,Cabbage were planted in a row on the ground. We also got to see their Herb garden, Taste the Fennel leaves and at the end buy any vegetables grown in their farm. They operate a full CSA.
Kids also got to explore the worms, worm bins and dig into the compost bins. They were taught to touch, feel and taste lot of leaves and texture of veggies.
All the children had nice opportunity feeding Kale leaves to the Chicken. They also had a nice experience petting the chickens. Kids also felt the hatched eggs from the chicken. All the kids really enjoyed feeding them.
Overall it was wonderful trip and all of us learned and explored the farm. Kids enjoyed the experience. Thanks to Full Circle Farm for showing us around their whole farm.
Drip irrigation is a great way to use less water while getting the water to where you want it. When we started last year at Viola’s garden, one of the first things we did was install a drip irrigation system. Tod, our expert gardener, set up all the lines and has been accommodating and installing more lines to irrigate new areas of the garden as we expand. This year, we have changed the garden set up a bit and put in a new bed so Tod thought it would be a good idea for me to try it out as I personally have never installed drip irrigation and would love to learn how. Here is my first attempt at installing drip irrigation.
Since I haven’t done this before, the whole thing feels a bit overwhelming to me. I went to Orchard supply and stared at the 50 some odd sections with these tiny fittings that say things like 1gph, 1/4″ in-line dripper, etc. They are cute little things but how was I going to parse it all?!?! Luckily, I met this really helpful woman at Orchard supply that spent some time explaining things to me. The first piece of advice she told me was that “there is no right way to do this, you can put it together in so many different ways to get water to where you need it” Perfect – just what I needed to hear – I didn’t have to do it a certain way. So I have posted what I did below. I thought my experience may be helpful to some reader as you may be like me and know the benefits but never actually installed it yourself. Just remember, there is no right way to do this!
I already had a supply line thanks to our existing irrigation. It is a brown colored tube that takes water from the water source to a number of feet out but doesn’t have any holes in it. I could either attach another tube to the end of this supply line or put holes in the supply line wherever I need them. It looks like this (see brown colored tube):
Then I got a little gadget that punctures holes into the tube. I used a little ‘connector’ that connects and seals the hole I just punctured into the tube to another ‘1/4″ dripper’ line that I wanted to use. A ‘dripper’ line already has holes preset. This worked for what I wanted because it was already approximately the spacing for veggies in a bed. I passed the dripper line under my bed so you don’t see it. The very end of the dripper line I folded over to make a kink and taped it to hold (I even used the tape that came with the dripper hose). That’s it! Here is what it looks like all finished.
The rocks are simply helping the hose lay flat since they come coiled up and need some time to unwind. It really was pretty easy to install. Btw, 1gph means 1gallon per hour. There are a number of different levels, 1gph, 2gph, 4gph to control how much water is released.
Last night, March 5, 2015 @ 6:30pm (Thursday) was the first community meeting for input on 771 Rengstorff park design. Thank you to everyone that came to the community meeting and expressed your support for shared gardens.
It was really amazing to hear so much support for creating a wonderful space open to the public that preserves and maintains the existing elements such as the trees and garden. There were many thoughts shared from residents and seemed to echo a vision of a space that is natural with paths and benches, a shared community or demonstration garden likely where the existing garden is, and historical features like the immigrant house and highlighting our agrarian past. People really wanted it to be bicycle and pedestrian friendly for access (yay!), and a learning space for kids (and everyone) to explore and learn about their natural world and food. Hopefully the bee hives that are there can stay as they too are an important part of the ecosystem.
Some features that make a garden a great fit for this space:
