April Showers Bring...

I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping that the weather improves and spring finally kicks into gear. Despite the rains, we have been managing to keep busy at the properties. A resident at Croft Place worked with me for a few hours today to begin transforming an underutilized area into a strawberry patch. It sprinkled on us a few times, but thankfully held off on the downpour until we had finished. Unfortunately the heavy rains meant I had to cancel Garden Club at Centerwood for today. It was simply not feasible to accomplish what I hoped to accomplish today with this rain, and I'm sure the kids would have been miserable outside for over an hour.

Enjoy a few pictures of our indoor (mostly tomato and pepper) plants for Croft Place and Centerwood. The kids at the Garden Clubs have been watering them each week and taking great care of them!

Updates

I apologize that my blog posts have been on hiatus, but I'm getting back into the swing of the things. We have had a ridiculously cold spring (as most of you probably know) and the weather has held up a lot of potential garden progress. However, I am still hopeful that the weather will turn around and our growing season will kick into gear.

If you remember from on earlier post, the residents at Santa Teresita started some veggies indoors back in late February. I stopped by infrequently to check on everything and the residents took amazing care of their plants. The lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower starts were growing crazy in their little newspaper pots. The tomatoes were close to outgrowing their small plastic containers and smelled delicious already. The peppers were coming along as well, too. Last week I went for a few hours and worked with about 8 youth to transplant the lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower into the garden. They did an amazing job, and the weather was gorgeous that day. I only hope they've endured these recent downpours. We also potted up the tomatoes and a few of the pepper plants.

At another property, Vivian McLean Place, we've been trucking in loads of compost-enriched topsoil to add to their boxes. In addition, back in March we all made beautiful postcards to send into the ZooDoo lottery at the Woodland Park Zoo. For those of you who don't know, the Zoo composts the feces from its herbivorous animals and sells it. The demand is so high, that twice a year when the Doo is ready they do a lottery in order to determine who will be able to purchase. 6 of us who submitted postcards were chosen and we picked up a total of 3 truckloads of dynamite doo for the gardens!

Garden Clubs have also been going strong despite my lack of blog posting. We made scarecrows and bird feeders, planted herbs in alternative "pots" (old shoes and gloves), made an organic pest spray using garlic, and made some mighty tasty guacamole.

I wish I had pictures to share at this time, but I will try to get a ton of great ones so my next post can be all pictures.

Thanks for reading!