Garden Club Mob

A very tidy garden, peppers and zinnias in the distance, still going in mid-November!

With a little help from our friends, the veg patch is looking very spiffy right now.  There was an amazing stretch of warm weather last week with Sat-Mon  in the 70's,  nothing like warm sunshine to motivate outdoor work.  On Saturday our besties John and Michele came out in the afternoon and together we cut back the dead fern and weeded the two, forty foot asparagus rows that we share.  Yesterday I picked up a scoop of compost from the landfill and John and I worked together to top the beds with a couple of inches of that black goodness and finished with a few more inches of composted leaf mulch.  I said to him "These are some of the best cared for asparagus beds in the world".

In between the asparagus marathon, my friends Diana and Celeste and Celeste's friend Weegy came out on Sunday for the first of what we hope will be an ongoing joint gardening effort among friends.  Locally and  now nationally there is a crop mob movement.  More geared towards large scale sustainable farms, a big group of folks work together at one location on major projects to help the farmer, they share a meal and each time go to a different farm belonging to one of the members of the mob.  As I toiled away on the homestead here I kept thinking how nice it would be to have help on certain projects, just to make more headway, and isn't it sometimes more fun to do work with friends to talk to? Not to mention more hands always make daunting jobs feel lighter.  When my friend Celeste said she was wanting to form a garden club, I proposed we combine the two ideas and the garden club mob was born. 

The sad news is that almost everyone we know that has a garden seems to also be too busy to share time in this way.  But I still have hope that our little garden mob may grow.  If you're in the vicinity and want to join the group let me know and I'll plug you in.  We are scheduled to meet at Celeste's house in early December and take on some weeding, mulching or whatever she deems most useful for her.  

Lettuce, spinach and beets, blankets ready for the frost, if it ever comes...

The group helped me tackle a corner of the veg patch that has gone to ruin over the past couple of seasons mainly because its gotten too shady to really grow veggies, so we've just been neglecting it. The result; lots of weeds, some various overgrown flowers that got tossed there on their way out of one spot but without a new home to go to, some very rambling tomatillo plants that actually put on quite a few late season fruit.  I just cooked up a couple of quarts to freeze for green salsa this winter.  The crew also helped weed and mulch the winter veg.  It was really nice to have help and company to face a job I had been avoiding for months, moral support is a wonderful thing sometimes.

Fall greens; weeded and mulched and ready for harvest and cool nights

Work done, we took a tour of our place which continues to show lots of fall color.  We still have not had a frost so mums, ginger lilies and roses are blooming.  We finished with a little potluck luncheon including home grown salad greens. Everyone came and went from 10-2 and there was still time for people to do more with their days.  I hope we'll be able to keep it going and get more folks involved, seems a very civilized way to see some great gardens, help each other out, and hopefully share plants and garden knowledge too.