Families Go Wild in the Garden!
What a busy day! With a great combination of new and regular volunteers alike, we accomplished a lot in the gardens! We made a list of tasks at the beginning of our session, and we managed to check everything off the list. Here’s what we got up to today…
The day started with the chilli harvest! Franc the gardener has grown these spicy chillies this year, and he needed our help to harvest them, as there were so many! He plans to dry them, and then infuse them in olive oil, to make a farm chilli oil!
We made sure to wear gloves while we were harvesting, as these were very spicy chillies. We wanted to make sure we didn’t touch the chillies with our hands and then touch our faces! Ouch!
We used secateurs to harvest the chillies, holding the chilli with one hand, and cutting with secateurs in the other hand. Our younger volunteers did a great job with the secateurs, considering they’re made for adult hands! We practised saying the word secateurs… Let’s see who remembers it next week!
We harvested loads of chillies, but we had to leave Franc to harvest the rest, as we had more work to do! The next task was to weed a new patch that we’ll use for growing this coming year. Weeding isn’t always easy, as we don’t want to pull out just any plants. In this patch, we noticed some chard and some comfrey, which we left in the ground. We knew from previous sessions that comfrey can be used as a fertiliser for beautiful flowers and fruits!
While we were digging up weeds, we also found some wiggly worms. It wouldn’t be a Families Go Wild garden session without the presence of worms, now would it!
The volunteers did a great job digging up and removing weeds from the ground. We then had to dig some holes, in which to plant our raspberry canes. These were kindly donated to us by a regular garden volunteer!
We added some rotted manure to the holes, to help our raspberry canes out with drainage, and made sure to water them in once they were planted. The volunteers named them Keekee-Raspberry and Cosmo-Raspberry!
Lastly, we went over to the raised bed, where we’ve planted coriander and salad leaves, and planted some garlic cloves. We might see them start to grow in the next few weeks. The growth will then slow down over winter, and start up again in the Spring, giving us garlic to harvest next Summer! The raspberries will also be ready in the summer, even though we’re planting them now. Learning this got us talking about how gardening requires patience, and that this can be difficult sometimes! Nevertheless, we are excited to see how our garlic and raspberries grow, as well as the other crops we’ve planted this Autumn.
