What runs but never gets tired? Water!

After a long wait, we started planting the garden last Wednesday. This plant was a test plant to see how well the plants will do in our brand new garden. We planted a bed of tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and okra. We had about 8 volunteers helping us out and finished rather quickly until we realized that the garden did not have a water hookup yet! (ohh noo) As some of you know, when you plant a new seedling in the ground, they need a nice drink of water so they can be happy in their new home. Well, the drip irrigation system was turned on, but I didn’t know what time it would come on and I really didn’t want our brand new baby plants to die on my watch. Luckily, some of our lovely volunteers from across the street let us borrow some water. We transported it in buckets and watered all of our new plants and they are doing great! I talked to one of the Campus Kitchen’s Reps from D.C. last week about our beds and she was amazed that we were planting tomato plants already because they just planted their cold weather plants. She said there was still snow on the ground (brrrr) so be glad you live in Texas!!

--Hannah Laird, Garden and Produce Coordinator

Why do potatoes make good detectives? Because they keep their eyes peeled.

Go check out Baylor’s Community Garden at 9^th and James! This garden will be the home of Campus Kitchen’s produce. Baylor’s Ecology program will also be teaching and helping us garden to the best of our abilities. The vegetables we will be growing this year are: drum roll please… radish, leeks seed, beets, carrots, kohlrabi seed, lettuce head, onion, peas, english peas, edible pod, swish chard, greens, kale, turnip, lettuce leaf, spinach and Collards! Any suggestions about other vegetables are welcome. Most of the produce will be used by the CK kitchen to prepare meals that will be distributed through community non-profits. We are so excited and lucky to have this wonderful opportunity to have such a great space to garden. Our garden will be completely organic and awesome. We cannot wait to get started but with this crazy Waco weather the garden is not completed yet. Once it is completed we will start planting right away. Our first garden training was canceled because of weather and will be rescheduled before the first plant. We hope to have a date soon and we will let you know as soon as possible.

-Hannah Laird, Garden and Produce Coordinator