Season's End: Celebrating Our Garden Journey
Hello Friends!
It has been a fantastic season in the garden! As we get into fall and the frost starts to come in, the plants are reaching the end of their season and so am I. This is my last week at Rē and it has been a fantastic time working in the garden and with all our lovely community members. We are starting to do our final wrapping up in the garden with fall garlic and bulb planting. We also planted our cover crop and it is already looking so healthy. We covered it with shade cloth to keep in the warmth on some of these chilly days (picture below). The rest of the garden has started to die back and has been harvested for seed saving and as veggies to donate to Our Neighbor’s Table. We have kept track of our harvests all summer long and we were able to donate 70 lbs of produce to the food pantry! We are so proud to have been able to share with our community. On top of the produce for the food pantry, we also grew many more veggies that were used for community dinners and by volunteers throughout the summer. We would love to give a shout-out to the new food pantry that Our Neighbors Table has opened in Amesbury which is now going to serve the community even closer to our garden!
With the wrap-up of the season, we have been gathering together plans for the garden next year! We are so excited to continue this project now that we have built the garden itself, collected materials, built up our community, and learned so much. I have compiled a “how to” of running the garden with ideas and lessons learned this summer to help direct the garden for next summer and get us on the right foot. It's always important to reflect on the year's challenges and successes in order to prepare and make every following year even better. I am so excited to see what the garden will become like in the future.
A big inspiration for our garden this year was the Regenerative school garden in Tennessee called the “Love Garden” (pictured above). We have worked to incorporate the differences and similarities of these gardens and states in the stories of our plants and of their heritage. Especially now, after the horrible destruction in Tennessee in the wake of the recent hurricanes we are thinking about everyone there. We would like to bring attention to the important contributions all our community in Tennessee has made and to the plants in our garden that highlight our connection to the original “love garden”. Namely, we would like to acknowledge Okra with a few words and a story from our Founder Ashlei:
“Okra, A beautifully wild looking, heat loving, quick growing plant. The flowers are eye-catching and the fruits are pod-like and if you blink they grow to be big and woody! Once the pods get larger than your thumb they are better suited for drying as a decoration or to dry and grind the seeds into alternative coffee. The smaller pods are delightfully tender as a crunchy and fresh snack. Okra is famous for its stories of coming from Africa. Seeds were braided in the hair of Africans who were enslaved and taken from their home and brought to Turtle Island (the Americas). These stories are beautifully shared by Leah Penniman in her book Farming While Black. Now okra is a staple along with collard greens and black-eyed peas in southern cuisine, as well as Indian food (Bindi). It has a mild flavor between sweet, green, and a little earthy. It can be prepared in many ways from pickling to frying and added to dishes like curries, or eaten by itself. Growing okra is fun as you can quickly create a little okra forest, or as we were affectionately called the 15’ Okra Arboretum. Yes, the plants can quickly turn into trees and you would hardly believe the secret to abundant okra plants! You have to bang on them with a stick!”
(Okra from our NH garden this year is pictured below)
As this is my last newsletter as we close out the season, I want to celebrate how far we have come. We started with the generous offer of a turf area from Camp Kent and an idea for a garden. With the help of some compost, our amazing community, some seeds, and hard work, we created a beautiful garden! I have been compiling pictures of our progress as we go to capture this incredible change over time. Thank you for being on this journey with us and just look at all that we have accomplished!
Thank you all for a beautiful season and for the opportunity to work with you all and in this beautiful space!
Best,
Isabel