The Chester Garden Project

Sorry for such a big delay in updating about the garden! The past month and a half has been spent transitioning between summer volunteers and school-year volunteers, but now we’re fully back into the swing of things. Now for a long post to catch you up on what’s been going on:

We’re now going to the garden twice a week- on Thursday afternoons around four and Saturday afternoons from about three to six. We did lots of weeding during the first few weeks of the school year. Everything has been growing like crazy thanks to all these rainy days we’ve been having, so there hasn’t been much of a need to water. Thankfully our new wood-chipped path between the beds is pretty much finished now, so we don’t have to walk through big puddles in the garden

The past two weeks at the garden have been spent harvesting. The biggest hit was watermelon- we definitely plan to plant lots more of it next year!

enjoying some watermelon at our new picnic tables

We’ve also harvested more basil than we know what to do with (pesto-making has been big this season!), tomatoes, summer squash, eggplant, chard, and peppers. After harvesting on the past two Saturdays, we’ve taken wheelbarrows and armfuls of produce throughout the Bennett homes and knocked on doors to distribute the goods. Everyone had a great time handing out all the things we’ve grown, and people were definitely happy to be receiving it. Here are some pictures of the distribution in action:

We also put together recipe books with directions for simple meals or snacks using mostly ingredients from the garden. The kids decorated their own books to take home, and we also made some extras to hand out with the produce around the neighborhood.

And, as always, we’ve been cooking up some of the produce for snacks on garden days- the squash and eggplant have been big hits (especially when sweetened up with a bit of cinnamon and sugar)!

what could be better than a squash the size of your body?

There are more pictures on our Flickr, so be sure to check them out! And check back soon- we’ll be updating much more regularly now!

Tags: cooking, harvesting, produce distribution, recipe books

This entry was posted on October 2, 2011 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.