This week was the last harvest of the summer! The garden will continue to produce and the food will be enjoyed by researchers, staff, and visiting groups, but the students and the gardener have all left for the season.
Thanks to all the volunteers for their hard work, the maintenance crew for tools and assistance, Karie Slavik for being Karie Slavik, and the kitchen for making the produce into food!
Stay tuned for next years gardening adventures!
final harvest of the summer
These last couple weeks fall has been in the air, with rainy nights, brisk winds, and lots of vegetables to harvest. Since there are only two more weeks left here at the biostation, we’ve been starting to take care of fall clean-up tasks: putting things away, cleaning the old starter pots from the summer, building scaffolding for the raspberries to climb up next year, and getting ready to put the garden to bed. Enjoy these late summer pics!
Here are just a FEW of the many attractions you can see up at the UMBS Hilltop Garden:
Late July is a great time to be in the garden. I’ve finished up the last successional plantings of the year last week, so the last little plantlets are just sprouting. These are the last lettuces, mesclun mixes, and baby spinach— which should be ready in about 4 weeks or just in time for our last harvest… The weeds are pretty well under control, so I just have a few hours/week general maintenance to keep all my plants growing happily without competition. Mostly the work to be done this time of year is the fun stuff: harvesting! We’ve been getting enough lettuce and spicy salad mix out of the garden to provide salad to the dining hall two days/week, as well as a variety of more exciting foods like zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, and every week a few snap peas and cherry tomatoes.
Aside from harvesting, it’s just a nice time of year to hang out in the garden, watching the bees buzzing around pollinating, smelling the marigolds, and marveling at how fast a pumpkin plant can produce SO MUCH vegetation and so many flowers!
Here are a couple pics from this week in the garden… but let’s face it, it’s better in real life, so come on by!
1. We have so many vegetables coming out of the garden these days that we have had to add an extra harvest date: Wednesday at 5:15 in the afternoon we harvested lots of salad greens, some lettuce, daikon radishes, beans, snap peas, mizuna, and 5 baby zucchini. Look forward to all the tasty veggies in the salad bar this week!
2. I’m no longer having Thursday evening garden visitation hours. So I’ll still be in the garden for anyone to stop by and visit on Wednesday mornings and Saturday afternoons. And of course please come by for harvest Sunday at 10 AM and Wednesday at 5:15 PM.
3. There are morning glory flowers in the garden starting yesterday. Come enjoy the prettiness!
Biggest harvest EVER today! We harvested salad greens, kale, daikon radishes, snap peas, zucchini, a cucumber, a few cherry tomatoes, and the first green beans!
Here are some pictures:
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