Community Garden News

by Jean Stark, Community Gardens Lead

With such a mild winter we are fully believing that it’s a real, not false, spring. Hope is alive. It’s time to plant onions and shallots and get the peas started.  The garlic is six inches high, and the weeds are taking hold. The nurseries are offering, potatoes, lettuce and kale starts and more each week. What are your hopes and plans for this year?  Have you gotten your hands in the dirt yet? I hope so.

There are sixteen gardeners at the community gardens, all with various sizes of plots. The best thing about helping organize and manage the community gardens is walking the paths around the gardens to see what’s growing there and how our gardeners are doing it. 

This year I’ve turned my small garden space into just two circular rows with plenty of room for the wheel barrow to navigate.  I can easily wheel in the mulch and turn the rounded corners without getting snagged.   

I enjoy licorice scented leaves like lovage, anise hyssop and fennel.  I’ve planted delphinium in remembrance of my mother’s flower gardens.  Last year I found angelica, an old fashioned biennial. Catnip, considered by many as a weed, has an honorable central location in my garden for the many cats I’ve loved, and for those whom I will meet and continue to coax into a playful frenzy and gentle intoxication. 

Among the sage, forget-me-nots, yarrow and bee’s friend, I’ll pluck lettuce, kale, and chard to keep my salad bowl full all summer. I will walk the gardens and be filled with appreciation of the gardens filled with cabbage, carrots, potatoes, peas, beans and more. It’s a delicious time of the year with the light growing and coaxing the gardens to come to life again.

If you have not strolled the gardens to get inspiration I invite you to come and take a walk along the grassy pathways.  Enjoy sixteen different gardeners way of working. Tilth also has two quarter-acre farm plots and two smaller farm plots with lot’s going on.

It looks like this year we may stay filled up, but if you’d like to get your name on the waiting list for a plot, or get to know us better by participating in a work party, please contact me at gardens@southwhidbeytilth.org.