Your weekly update on all things compost and garden related!
Happy St. Roch Sunday! This week we collected about one and a half bins of food scraps for our compost pile. We also got to talk to some of the participants who came and said hi while we worked in the garden. Lynne came by and we always love a visit from a Lynne! Our compost pile is almost entirely full and if we get a drop off next week like the amount we collected this week, it may just be the last load we can add in this pile! That means we’ll be opening up our second compost bin in just under three months! Exciting stuff!
I’ve started pulling pineapples to try and grow in the garden. I’ll keep you posted if they survive, but they were frozen, so we shall see…
Today we also held our Love the Boot at Galvez Garden event. We built a new bed from recycled materials and planted potatoes in containers.
Check out the before and after photos of the new bed!
Our dear neighbor Annie showed up ready to work and when the clock struck 11:00 am we got straight to it! I explained that we were building a no till garden bed with a nod to Hügelkultur techniques. I hope she was into it, because I couldn’t help but geek out and tell her how fond I am of permaculture techniques… but no till gardening is amazing! She humored me as I talked about lasagna layers and was quite the helper! I do believe this is the quickest bed I’ve put together yet! Including moving all the compost, manure, and potting soil from one side of the property to the other, we got everything planted in just shy of 40 minutes.
We planted peas (because Dylan just can’t get enough of them), beets, and marigolds. Just as we were wrapping up with all the heavy lifting my two other volunteers showed up. They got South and North Galvez confused and on bikes, ended up at a spot that was very much NOT the garden…
I told Annie she had done more than enough (I didn’t want to bore her with a tour of the garden that she’s already taken) and thanked her for all her hard work. With my two new volunteers we worked about another thirty or so minutes and planted the remaining marigolds and potatoes in containers. Farris and Zakara informed me that they had a garden bed that wasn’t growing anything, so I showed off our butterfly garden and do believe I’ve made them converts to growing a pollinator bed at their place! Mother and daughter both agreed that lavender and butterfly bush are lovely and after reassuring them how hardy milkweed is, I’m fairly certain they’ll be assisting monarchs migration in their neighborhood in the future. I sent them home with one of the containers of sweet potatoes as a thank you for going with the flow at our day of service.
Dylan and Jesse joined as we finished our planting and the I Dig It team was back to work with putting all the materials from the event away. As there was still some time left for our compost collection we headed home for lunch. After a perfectly times rain shower we went back out to collect our bins and tend to the compost. The new plants just loved the rain and everything looks great at the garden.
It was a long day, but it a good one. We spent time with neighbors and made more friends of the garden. We diverted another bin and a half of food scraps from the landfill and planted a new bed that will add variety to what we’re already growing. We participated in a statewide campaign to Keep Louisiana Beautiful, and dare I say, we had fun hosting it.
From all of at at the I Dig It team, thanks for helping our garden grow!
I dig it. 
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