THE Com POST

Your weekly update on all things compost related!

Happy Sunday, y’all! This is the last Sunday before Mardi Gras, and would you believe it, we’re open for your food scraps! In addition, as promised I can finally share more details about the Cultivating the Community Garden Grant! The NOLA Artist Incubator has been awarded funding to increase food production at Galvez Garden. This week and next week we’ll make ourselves available at the start of compost collection hours to share more information about the project and gain valuable community input. We’re so excited for what’s in store at Galvez Garden, please join us in these exciting new developments!

Today we showed up with plants and pavers for the Native Plant Initiative being installed at the Garden. We always open before 10:00, but when we arrived at 9:45, I was disappointed to learn that someone had dropped off their compost in our pile before our open hours, and not in the black bins, as is customary for this whole process to work.

As such, I made this flyer and posted on our social media to remind people of what they can and cannot do at a community composting drop off site.

The frustrating part about this is that I don’t know who is doing it, and/or if they follow our social media. So alas, the problem hasn’t fully been addressed. Here’s a picture of our beautiful swamp sunflowers to help us all calm ourselves at this time. It’s really beautiful, just take a look!

Ok, I have centered myself, but in case my readers are still on edge, here is a picture of the gorgeous Peggy Martin roses we planted this morning. Just thinking of how beautiful these climbers are going to be makes my heart happy.

We planted two of the roses around the lean-to and two dwarf native blueberry bushes in front of them this morning. It’s really exciting to finally be able to add more plants to the garden.

We collected very little from the bin, but including the three bags dropped off (in an unwanted area…don’t get me started…) that left us at an approximate 2/3rds full bin of food scraps diverted from landfills this week.

In addition to collecting food waste to convert to compost today, we also laid out 136 flagstone pavers, planted two dozen native plants, and I must say: the garden is really looking sharp!

We have multiple projects going on at the same time, but the above images are of progress from the NOLA Artist Incubator’s Native Plant Initiative. Made possible with funding from Keep Louisiana Beautiful, the NOLA Artist Incubator is transforming the Mandeville side of the property to become a native plant sanctuary. It’s coming along great!

We’re so excited about the new developments and opportunities for the Galvez Garden, I feel I might burst as I try and write it all down! For me, these improvements demonstrate that dreaming is a worthy endeavor. With enough hope, hard work and willpower, anything is possible. Sometimes the outcomes will be even greater than you could have ever imagined.

Until next week, happy gardening and composting!

And, Happy Mardi Gras!