Fall is in full swing at the Teaching Garden, and as the days get shorter and colder we notice our plants slowing down a bit... but there is still plenty to do!
In the last two weeks we finished up planting our cover crops, worked on thinning out some of the seeds we started recently (thinning is removing seedlings that are crowded together to give others room to grow), harvested our sweet potatoes, and are working on weeding, weeding, weeding to leave the garden in good shape for the spring.
Here's a timelapse video of just a portion of our sweet potato harvest. We harvested over 120 lbs total!
After harvesting sweet potatoes, they need to cure for 1-2 weeks in a dry place to allow the starches to convert to sugars. We created this (almost) rodent proof curing table in our garden. We simply covered it with a tarp when there was rain in the forecast - it worked pretty well!
This is also the time of year for all of the infrastructure work we haven't had time for during the peak of the season. This week we built new doors for our hoop house to keep the plants inside nice and toasty this winter. Here is the old door, new door frame, and new door complete with plastic.
Donations are also still going strong. Last week we were lucky to have some help from volunteers to harvest for Black Feminist Project. We donated kale, collards, swiss chard, cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, parsley, oregano, radishes, butternut squash, pac choi, and lettuce heads.
This week we donated to Chilis on Wheels. We donated kale, collards, swiss chard, pac choi, lettuce heads, radishes, carrots, beets, scallions, chives, sweet peppers, hot peppers, cherry tomatoes, eggplants, and about 50 pounds from our sweet potato harvest.
We will continue to keep the garden up, harvest, and have classes out at the garden through November, but this weekend is our last weekend open to the public, come visit us!
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