December Garden Tips

Here at the Gardens Project we LOVE winter gardening and think it should get just as much attention as summer gardening does.
Winter gardening is the time for vegetables that make great soups for rainy and chilly days. Beets, broccoli, chard, kale, collards, herbs, leeks, onions, garlic, peas, salad greens, turnips, radishes, olives, persimmons, pineapple guavas and mushrooms are all ready to harvest.
December is also a great time to make use of hoop houses to extend your season, build a greenhouse or toolshed, spruce up your garden paths, or work on your garden plans for next year.
It's also time to direct seed your fava beans, bell beans, vetch and peas; and when it rains, you can plant barley, rye, oats and wheat. You can also sow flats of lettuce to transplant and plant cover crops to nourish your soil for your spring garden.

Michelle Obama is busy getting the White House Kitchen Garden ready for winter too! Check out their website, complete with recipes to help your garden sustain you throughout the winter.

We have a new Americorps Member!

Katrina is working part time as a health educator for the Potter Valley Youth & Community Center, and part time here at the Gardens Project.

We are also excited to announce that two of our former Americorps members, Cassie Dillman and Lucy Neely, have now joined our staff!

November Garden Tips

What to do in Your Garden this month:

Welcome to fall in the garden!

With the change in temperature and weather, most activities this time of year center around clean-up and composting of fallen fruit, mulching any leftover perennials, making compost, sheet mulching, preserving any of your remaining harvest and general clean up. It is a great time to clear out your green tomatoes and make delicious canned green tomato pickles and relish for your winter pantries. You can also divide and transplant hearty root plants like artichokes and comfrey.

Finally, you’ll want to prepare for frost protection of your plants. The first hard frost is usually around the beginning of December. For those who grow and either cure or press their olives, it is almost time to plan for picking. For some of the tender citrus plants you’ll want to build canopies for those trees and move your container plants into a safe zone where they won’t fall victim to frost damage. I move all of my tender container plants up onto my covered deck. Please refer to the Frost Protection for Citrus and Other Subtropicals guide from the University of California Cooperative Extension for additional information on the impact ofhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif frost damage to plants and frost damage prevention measures.


What to plant?

In November you can directly sow onions and garlic. It’s also time for cover crops and fava beans.

For more Gardener's Tips, please click Inland Mendocino Planting Guide(Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

When in doubt, there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

Happy Mendo Winter Gardening!

Weeding the Garden... A GAME!

Wet and cold weather keeping you inside this week? Here's a fun indoor game for kids and grown-ups alike!

"Weeding the Garden" is played by placing a line down the center of the room, dividing it in two equal parts (you can use a jump rope or a length of masking tape as the center line). Next, you and the kids get some old paper out of the recycle bin... newspaper ads and used office paper work just fine. Wad up the papers into balls (this is loads of fun on its own!). You'll need about 20 wads of paper. Toss half of the paper wads on one side of the line, and half on the other. Divide into two teams (1 or more people can be a "team").

Now, here's the story and the action part of the game! The paper wads are "weeds" in your "garden" and you want to throw all your weeds over the "fence" (the center line) onto the opposing team's garden... but they are doing the same to you! Set a timer for one minute, get in your "garden," and begin "weeding" as fast as you can. When the other team throws weeds into your garden, just keep throwing them back! When the timer rings, freeze. Count which team has the fewest weeds.

Sound fun? This idea came from the Laurel Chambers at the Northcoast Nutrition Collaborative... visit their website and just click on a fruit or vegetable to get a fun energizer game! Also you can check out more active ideas like this in "Sneaky Fitness."

Soup's On!

The weather is getting a little more “November-y” around here, and the BEANS teens are cooking up some hearty veggie stew with Mendocino County school children.

Making soup is great in so many ways… 1) It’s fun and easy for kids to add all the ingredients to the soup pot; 2) Cooking soup warms up the house and gives it a nice homey aroma; 3) Soups can hold all sorts of ingredients! Whatever’s fresh at the farmers’ market, garden, fridge, or pantry; 4) Kids who are picky can often be “tricked” into eating lots of veggies if they’re puréed and added to soups; and 5) Homemade soup is economical… a great way to feed a family for $2.00 (or less) per serving.

Check out the BEANS recipe for Hearty Vegetable Stew (and others!). Feel free to customize the recipe by adding your favorite herb, pasta, potatoes, or more spice!

Gardens Project Goes to the Food Security Conference!

Tarney, Miles, Cassie, and Belinda are all heading to the 15th Annual Community Food Security Conference
from Friday Nov. 4 until Tuesday Nov. 8.

Over the past 15 years, CFSC has worked to catalyze a broad and far-reaching food systems movement. Each year, CFSC brings people together to learn from each other and to shape the future of the food movement. CFSC held its first conference with 170 attendees in Los Angeles in 1997 and this year they are returning to California for "Food Justice: Honoring our Roots, Growing the Movement."

CFSC and the movement have grown exponentially, and so has the annual conference! There will be over 1,000 participants from almost every state, many Canadian provinces, and five continents. The California Food California Food and Justice Coalition and Food First will be the conference hosts and have teamed up with many Bay Area organizations to help CFSC put on a fantastic event.


We are all very excited to attend this conference where we will share, learn, and network with other individuals and organizations working to rebuild the food system!

Some of the workshops we will be attending include how to incorporate garden and farm produce into school cafeterias, what food policy councils are working on in other cities across the country, how to develop community food leaders, what cities are doing with urban farms and how they are incorporating youth, and many, many more exciting food-related topics!