From the Gardens Registrar: Clean Up; Workday This Weekend; General Workday Information; UH Workday Mysteries

Hello Gardeners,

CLEAN UP – Even this late in the season, many of our garden plots continue to look beautiful. There are lots of cabbages, kales, and greens of all sorts. We are still hosting large numbers of monarch butterflies, and the turkeys and cranes are eating exceptionally well. However, it being mid-September, there are getting to be a lot of dead vegetable plants in plots. If your tomato plants have died (as most of mine have), this is a good time to pull them up, collect the rotten tomatoes, and haul it all to the weed pile. If your bean plants are dead, haul those too. Some people believe you should cut the bean plants but leave the roots in the soil to add nitrogen. Unfortunately, recent research does not seem to back this up. In any case, clear out the dead stuff, get rid of the rotting produce, and haul back some leaves to cover the space. Do your garden clean-up a little at a time, and it won’t be an enormous chore later on.

WORKDAY THIS WEEKEND – We are planning a workday this Sunday, September 22, at Eagle Heights, from 9am – Noon. The task will be path maintenance. Here’s the link to sign up: https://doodle.com/poll/bvfkh6q2xhdcz7ak  The weather this weekend looks iffy - please note, if it rains, the workday will be cancelled.

WORKDAYS (IN GENERAL) – About 250 of our gardeners have not done a workday yet this year. That’s okay – many of the gardeners prefer to pay the “no workday fee”, and will pay it by the deadline, which is December 1. But we really want people to do workdays. It’s a great opportunity to meet other gardeners, and maybe see parts of the garden you don’t normally see. Many people find it satisfying afterwards to see an area they worked on, and know that they had a part in improving it. Doing a workday is an important part of the whole “community garden” experience. Plus, of course, you can get sunburned, calloused, and sore. What’s not to like?

We will continue to have workdays until the end of the gardening season. (Last year’s final workday, for instance, was November 18.) But how late we go into the fall will depend on the weather. If you do want to do a workday rather than pay the fee, it would be a good idea to sign up soon.

LOST SWEATSHIRT AT UH WORKDAY SEPTEMBER 8 – If you left a blue hooded medium-sized Regent Tennis sweatshirt at University Houses Gardens, please let me know. It was found in the garden shed. I would also appreciate any information on the identity of someone named Nick (last name indecipherable) who did the workday, and listed his plot as “700 row Eagle Heights.”

Happy gardening,

Kathryn