Update From The Urban Farm and The Gourd Garden

It has been such an exciting year in the garden!  Charlie and I have learned so much about urban farming, gourds, and composting that the business model for Groovy Gardens is yet again evolving into an even greater adventure.  This will be described in a later post...today, I want to give some updates on the vegetable patch and gourd garden.

Here are a few snapshots of the back alley plot early spring 2011:

As you can see, this area was neglected and served as a litter trap for the dumpster across the alley.  We had the 8 hour clean-up day in June.

The next few pictures I took today, it is October 6th and we are still getting quite a bounty of produce from this small plot.  This week, a neighbor friend and I cleaned up a pile of logs, branches and leaves from a  dying tree that was cut down by a neighbor.  The pile was next to the vegetable patch so we broke down the branches and stacked them behind the compost pile and used the logs to surround the garden.  It looks so much better!  Also, from the block clean-up I had TONS of decomposed leaf and twig debris from years of build-up.  I put this around the plants as well as the dead leaves to insulate from the cooler nights we are having.

The Gourd Garden in the front of our place has taken over 30 feet of space!  The vines and tendrils have stretched and wound around the arborvitae in frount of our door as well as the neighbors (they don't mind hopefully).  The next set of pictures is supposed to be a panoramic type to show how much space this thing has taken up...

Yeah, oh my gourds is right.  This consists of 4 plants that originate from the center picture.

Here are snapshots of some of the gourds themselves...

The stem on the larger gourd is 17 inches to the bowl, the bowl is 18 inches in diameter.

Looking up into the arborvitae you can see the bowls hanging down from the vines above.

What a great growing season this has been!  Time to start canning some of these tomatoes!