Days 9 & 10

This is why I am so bad at keeping a diary! I just get caught up and forget to write so this post may be really long. I'll try to do better this coming week.

Someone is about as excited about the new compost bin going in at the garden as I am! My one dedicated vet took my suggestion to tell the others about the compost bin I wanted to build for the garden a step further and proposed that compost buckets be put in the dining area and break room the veterans use. I was so surprised and proud of the initiative taken by my lone volunteer. I call him my compost guy. Head of the compost committee. The feeling I got when he told my supervisor and me that we needed two 5 gallon buckets for kitchen waste compost was something akin to a math teacher whose student comes up with his or her own theorem. It was wonderful. I felt so touched.

Anyway, garden progress is as follows:

• All but one tomato plant have fruit. For some reason the plant is a yellow brown color and just looks sad and wilty. I'm not sure how to help it. I put some plant food on it, gave it water and took off the leaves that were touching the ground. Now I can only hope for the best.
• The peppers are flowering and a few have some fruit. A lot of them have started to list heavily so I have put makeshift stakes, made from the nearby dead tree, next to each of them. 
• The carrots are coming up strong despite losing many of their siblings due to the thinning process.
• One of the squash plants had a huge beautiful buttery flower on it. It stayed open for the morning but closed after the sun really came out.
• More pumpkins were planted and a few of the seedlings that have already been planted are coming up. 
• The corn is growing taller. (Probably the least exciting plant in the entire garden in my opinion)
• Out of over ten strawberry plants, one has two berries on it. They are living up to the rumors that strawberries don't produce much in their first year. 
• Cucumbers are starting to spread out but no buds yet. 
• Mulch and rocks will be added soon giving the garden a much more finished look!
• Compost bin scheduled to be done by the end of this week! 

I went on two gleans again this week. A sugar snap pea glean, in a man's backyard garden that is honestly bigger than The Healing Ground, and an apricot glean in the backyard of a foreclosed home. It was incredible how large the man's garden was! He had over 34 tomato plants! He said he planned to donate a lot of his produce to BMAC, had been helping a pregnant woman by giving her produce, and let a family whose house had burned down use some of his space for their own garden. I always think it is wonderful to see that in a time when everyone says that people are only looking out for themselves that people like The Retiree do what they do. I felt the same way in New Orleans during our orientation as I looked around and saw all the volunteers that were willing to spend their breaks helping people they had "no connection" to nearly seven years after the disaster. After picking all the peas we could we got a taste of what potato picking would be like. You take a pitchfork and jam it into the ground around a potato plant then try and pull up the whole thing. If the potatoes don't come up attached to the root, you dive into the dirt and fish around for them. The Retiree made fun of me for how slowly I did it on my first try. I'm excited for potato picking season. I feel like it will be great dirty work!

The apricot glean was less exciting. There were at least ten volunteers ranging in age from maybe 11 to 50 or 60 all working on one tree. The amount of fruit on that tree was astounding! It seemed like it just kept coming and after we were done it was significantly less orange. This upcoming week I am looking forward to building the compost bin and, of course, the Fourth of July!