Community Garden, Part I

We just got a plot in a UCSB community garden! Today we picked out our spacious plot and spent almost an hour with shovel, gloves, and wheel-barrel to take out the forest of weeds — it had a garden in it a year ago, but has completely gone to seed since then. There were many humongous thistle plants, mustard, clover, and other gigantic weeds that we did a good job clearing out (but still a long ways to go!). We only took “after” pictures and wish we had taken some “before” pictures, but we were just too eager to get started!

Here’s a little album of garden pictures (and I’m sure more will be added). I talk about a few of the individual pictures below.

This is the entire little plot we have, from an apple tree in the back right corner to the white bird cage at the back, the fence at the left, and the rickety “door” on the front.

Here’s a close-up of the apple tree in the corner (and a cactus in the front right corner and some small pepper plants).

There’s actually a little trail with stones down the middle that we didn’t see at all until we removed the weeds.

And here I am with one wheel-barrel full of weeds — we carried out three similar loads this evening. Crazy!

We get all of this for just $30 a year, which is amazing. Plus, we have access to a shed full of shovels, rakes, wheel-barrels, gloves, and tons of other equipment. There are also multiple free compost heaps, horse manure delivered regularly, and several fruit trees (I saw fig, almonds, lemons, apricot, and others) that we can take a few fruits from when we visit. Since it’s “organic” we can’t actually use any chemical fertilizers, but they’ve got great horse manure on site! 🙂 We’re really looking forward to making this into our garden, and I think it’s so great that UCSB provides this program!

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