Springtime at the Garden of Eaton

It was a beautiful day today, I was feeling pretty good, and I had some extra time, so I decided to wander over and do some work at the community garden. Our city has a pretty good community garden program with over 400 plots spread out among around a dozen garden sites. I have gardened at The Garden of Eaton (name for its location on Eaton Street) garden site for about five or six years and last year started volunteering on the community garden's ‘leadership committee.'

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All photographs by @veckinon

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Once I was at the garden, I decided to get a few pictures. It is always great to get a look at things early in the season to compare it to how things look come harvest time.

Our garden site has 36 total plots. Some sites in the program have as few as 12 and one site has close to a hundred. Most of them are about the same size as ours though.

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There are four plots in this picture. Mine is the one closest to the camera and takes up most of the frame. Everything but the tomatoes has been planted, but not everything has come up yet. The broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes are pretty obvious. There are also onions and peas that have come up, but are pretty hard to see in the picture. I'm still waiting on carrots, beets and green beans to show their tiny little faces.

There are also some enormous leeks that you can see in my neighbors garden. They started them last fall and they are looking great!

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Here is a close up of some Cauliflower next to some radishes. I usually plant radishes between some of my slower growing crops. They don't use much for nutrients and are ready to pick before the other plants even notice they are there. So, effectively, you don't need any more space to grow them. It's like free food!

Those tiny little round leaf plants you see speckled across the garden are purslane. Many people treat purslane like a weed around here, but it is actually edible--being one of the best vegetable sources of omega 3s--and also is a great companion plant to many other species. In addition to creating ground cover and providing a mulching effect, it also supposedly draws up moisture and nutrients and adds nitrogen to the soil.

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Some peas just poppin' up.

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Some rhubarb flowering in one of my neighbor's plots.

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A lil' tomato plant in the plot across from mine. I will probably wait another week or two to plant my tomato starts. Missoula, MT is in hardiness zone five and has a relatively short growing season, with frost-free days from mid-May to late September. Tomatoes typically will not really do very well until the average soil temp is around 65 degrees F. In Montana, waiting 'til the soil is this warm does not leave much time for the plants to produce, especially for many fancy heirloom varieties. However, planting when the soil is still cold can also prevent the plant from growing or producing to its full potential (this is also true with chilis). Personally, I prefer to wait until the soil is warm and then choose a fast maturing variety of tomato such as Early Girl or Jet Setter. This ensures good yields.

You can eliminate a lot of these growing zone related issues if you have a greenhouse. Not everyone, myself included, can pull off this option. You can also grow these types of plants in above-ground containers. The soil in containers will warm up faster than the ground. After having little success growing peppers, I started growing them in containers at my house instead of in the ground and have been a lot luckier.

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We grow grapes and hops on the trellises around the gazebo. And there are some raspberry bushes on the left.

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One of our gardeners planted an elderberry tree last year. I can't wait until it gets big enough to really produce. I hear elderberry makes a great wine. This is in part due to its relatively high tannin content.

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A chive growing among the dandelions.

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The inside of a tulip.

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Our compost bins. These are actually what brought me to the garden today. In the very first picture, at the top of the page, you can kind of make out that the front of these bins was overgrown with tall grass and weeds. I cut the grass and weeds. You can see the pile of grass I cut at the end of the series of bins, just in front of a pile of straw. Afterwards, I turned the contents of bin two over in to bin three.

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Mmmmmmmm, decay.

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The tool shed.

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Frank's memorial mural

There was a gardener here named Frank who lived right next to the garden site. He had been working the soil there in that plot that had the rhubarb plant in it since the garden site was created. He was kind of a fixture at the garden. He would regularly come out and visit with whoever happened to be working in the garden, pretending he had to check the sprinkler heads or some other random task. Anything to get him out there to socialize really. He always had a gorgeous, well kept plot. He really left an impression on everyone he met. He passed away last year at the age of ninety. I swear though, he didn't look a day over seventy-eight. After he passed away, his daugther and her family took care of the plot for the rest of the season. At the end of the year, we had a local artist design a mural to put on our shed in memory of Frank. After the artist copied the outline of the mural to the shed, a bunch of us from the garden painted it with a little direction from the mural artist. There was an article in our local paper about it.

A new gardener took over his plot this year. We always joke with her about the exceptionally large shoes she has to fill being in Frank's plot. She seems up to the challenge though.

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Thanks for taking a look at my garden. Hope you enjoyed. If you would like to read more about how I got into gardening, check out this article...

Spring is Coming! Community Gardens and Grandmas

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Best wishes,
@veckinon