2021 Community Garden

It all started with a dream, with the random musings of a group of women. With a “wouldn’t it be nice if…” and a “You know, we have the space….” We had just moved into a MUCH larger location, and we had SEVEN acres that went along with it. Once the idea was brought up, it was kicked around for a bit and hemmed and hawed over … but then (with a little bit of pestering and some well laid prodding) the idea started to gain momentum. We have the space, the products and the manpower… why NOT do a Community Garden?

And so that’s exactly what we did!

We set to work researching. What seeds are the best for summer gardens in our zone? What fruits and veggies did everyone want to grow? When is our last frost? When do we need to start seeds? What kind of garden do we want? Raised beds or standard in ground beds? Layout?

While working on the finer details we decided to get our seeds ordered and started inside with kits ordered from Lowes. In early March Everyone got 50 pods and their pick of seeds and went to work.

Here we are planting seeds with our families. It was a great learning experience for the kids! They loved helping out and watching the seeds sprout and grow!

Within a few days we had tiny little sprouts! Within a week they were an inch tall, and two weeks later they were HUGE! We kept them in sunny spots around the office and watched them grow like proud mama hens.

By the end of March some of them had to be moved into bigger pots!

…and then came the real work. Now we had to address the issue of the Garden itself.

We picked a spot that would get plenty of sun during the day (with a few hours of shade) and set to work on our garden.

Now that’s a nice pile of dirt…

Russ, our CEO, Owner and Worlds Best Boss, doesn’t like to do ANYTHING sub par, so naturally we needed to run water and electric out to the garden . We measured out our area, and started measuring and cutting WeedEnder to use as our base. See our water and electric pole sticking up in the middle?

We decided on four ‘L’ shaped raised container beds, with two people sharing each bed. We decided on an 18″ height to make planting and harvesting easier on everyone. And we went with Steel siding for the beds because… why not?

And then Russ and the guys assembled the raised beds, and we started filling them with dirt and potting soil, and then we measured and cut our WeedEnder fabric to fit and use where we wanted!

We installed our center bed (where we sneakily placed a sprinkler), and installed our spigot for water and electric box. We also laid double ground mulch around the entire inside of the area. We put up a small 4x4x6 greenhouse to move the sprouts to that weren’t quite ready to get planted.