Poco Mountain Girl

Whew! Gardening in Colorado is tougher than I expected!

For the first time ever, we have become part of a community garden. They call it an urban garden, but actually, it is more like a village garden. As you can see, the setting is not exactly urban.

Yesterday was the first “work day”, where everyone joined together to dig, weed, and amend the soil of the common plots (from which the produce will be donated to people in need).

And yes, those are clouds in the sky. We have had a stretch of uncharacteristically cloudy and rainy days here.

The work day was definitely a family endeavor by the garden members. There were quite a few kids, which added to the fun, noise, and commotion.

There’s my girl in her tomato hat, along with her newly inseparable friend, Hazel.

There is a little playground that adjoins the garden. The kids are loving it.

The members, along with helping in the common areas, each have their own planting space.

This is our own sweet plot. I have to say, this picture was taken after several hours of work on our part. Lots of shoveling and rock-picking. The soil is perfectly depleted of every nutrient, pure clay just below the inch of fill dirt surface, and studded with thousands of rocks. Yet we love having our own little piece of Colorado.

Everyone pitched in for a truckload of compost. We got 4 1/2 wheelbarrows and tilled it into our plot.

We also added this yellow coffee chaff from Allegro Coffee, as well as some coffee grounds from Starbucks, and a few veggie scraps from my very own kitchen.

After we got rid of as many rocks as possible and dug down to loosen several inches of earth, we threw our amendments in and had it tilled. It’s nice and loose now, and although our little plot looks sparse and dry, there are actually earthworms alive and well down in that clay. I also found quite a few mushrooms growing just below the surface.

Everyone did different things to their own gardens. I have no idea what some of them were up to…but it should be fun to see it all in come together in the end.

It was definitely cool to see everyone excited and putting so much effort and energy into this recently-destitute plot of ground.

Some people, of course, like to stay as far away from all the hubbub as possible, imagining they are all alone on their very own 120-acre farm in the middle of nowhere…

…until someone else moseys over for a neighborly chat (above, far right). Solitude is good, but then, there’s nothing like a couple of farm men watching their women work.

Watch for more (ground) breaking news on the garden!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Colorado, Garden, The Great Outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.