Insectary at Halsey

April is feeling more like June, if you ask me? The weather has been beautiful, and the yard is full of our favorite insect, the honey bee. I decided to let our Halsey garden go fallow this season because of the addition of the Bybee and Leighton garden sites. What that means is that, the last season of collards and kale I let bolt, and that’s like a calling card for pollinators, so many flowers and the yard is just humming with bees. We hope that sometime soon we will be getting a colony or two and possibly be able to share some honey with some of the agencies we support? My thought was to put honey in small baby food type jars and give them away to people in need? We will be planting the Terry Site again this  year after it was left fallow for a few seasons so we could rotate crops, and be better stewards of the soil. We pray that everyone has a great season growing food, and make an effort to share some of it with someone that wouldn’t normally have access to healthy food. Remember to try and use heirloom varieties if you can and shoot for some OMRI certified or naturally made insecticides and soaps for deterrents!

Cheers to a successful 2016!

Bob Dinges

Organizer and Founder of Giving Vegetable Gardens Charity

 

 

 

Don’t Be Fooled … not spring yet!

As this heat wave hits us here in Portland Oregon people are thinking spring is officially here, not so, we could still be hit with a bit of cold, so be patient, plan and get your soil ready. Plant your peas, asparagus, onions and carrots, but be careful with leafy vegetables by clotching them or perhaps use some poly cover. Here’s some pictures of what we did last weekend at our new Leighton site and prepping the last section at the Albina site as well as the new to us utility trailer that was donated to us by the Gillenwater Farm, what a gift, this is really going to make our logistics a whole lot easier!