Community Garden Update: Digging up the Earth - May 4, 2013

After our first meeting of the Community Garden, Montana temperatures were still too cool for planting and May 1st brought a new snowfall. By the 4th, it was shirt-sleeve weather. The snow had melted and the sun was shining; we were invigorated! Summer was on its way and we took the opportunity to prepare our garden plots.

The entrance to the Community Garden.  David is seen through the fence digging in our plot.

The first thing we needed to do was turn the soil. David took charge of instructing and demonstrating the best and most efficient method of doing this. Ever since he was a little boy, he has been interested in vegetable gardening and would have turned a family-owned city lot into a garden if he had had permission. Later as a newlywed, he turned our humble backyard into a vegetable garden where he grew corn, cucumbers, and a few other vegetables along the fence. We introduced ourselves to pressure canning at that time, and David still boasts about his delicious vegetable soup from our early years of canning.

David oversees the job.

Obviously other garden members had started preparing their plots before we did, as evidenced by raised beds, wire cages, and a garden trellis.

Prepared plots north of ours. The triple raised bed in middle-center of picture is the community herb bed. 

Digging deep and breaking up chunks of mud loosened the soil and prepared the ground for the seeds and seedlings to come. The three community beds to the left in the picture below had already been planted with garlic and onion, with corn to be planted in the near future.

Mallory, Eileen, and Marlene

Planted the autumn before, the garlic bulbs showed early signs of growth.

The community garlic bed will be harvested by all members of the garden.

The community onion bed looked promising as green shoots of onion leaves stretched towards the sun.

Looking forward to harvesting an onion or two when they become available. 

Feeling the good earth between your fingers is one of the rewards of gardening.

Eileen and Mallory sit for awhile and feel the soil.

The community strawberry patch in its infancy. Wondering how much it will produce this year.

The community strawberry patch.

Hooper's, one of the local garden centers highly respected for its long-time service to the Flathead Valley, once advised as a good rule of thumb, that vegetables should not be planted when snow is on the Swans. As a Montana newcomer, we took their advice. But after 8 years of vegetable gardening up north, we know it's a hit or miss kind of thing. We take our chances and plant, even though the Swan Mountains may still be covered in snow.

Marlene turns the soil with the snow-covered Swan Mountains in the background.

After a couple of hours of work, we admired our handiwork. We were eager to get some seeds into the ground.

David looks over the plots.

Our plots were ready for the next stage of the garden - planting!