Growing through the winter

Learn tricks for growing veggies and herbs through the winter at the Campbell Community Garden.

Join Sarah Smith (The Gardensmith Landscape Design and Campbell Garden director) at a winter growing class, this Sunday, October 19th, at  2pm

At the class you will learn what has and has not worked for us in our Milwaukie area garden, how to build a simple, inexpensive, cover to protect plants through at least the milder parts of winter, and how to get a jump on spring growing. The class will include handouts and a tour of the garden.

The Campbell Garden, Winter 2013. Soon after this snow storm, we harvested kale, chard, and lettuce!

We are entering our third winter gardening at the Campbell Community Garden and are looking forward to applying what we have learned in past seasons to an excellent winter harvest in 2015. Through our Harvest Sharing Program, we have donated 1,324 pounds of produce from the garden this year; we probably won't meet our goal of 2,000 pounds before December 31st, however we may be close!

Winter Growing Class

• Sunday October  19th
• 2pm to 3pm, (Stay after to help plant kale in our Harvest Sharing Garden)
• At the Campbell Community Garden (park at SE 47th & Adams Street and walk down the alley)
• This class will be held rain or shine -winter gardening can be wet!
• If you want to sit, please bring a folding chair.
• Free with a suggested donation of one packet of seeds (radish, carrot, and cilantro seeds are most needed), or a roll of Velcro plant tie, jute twine, or blank plant tags, or a jar of peanut butter for our neighborhood food drive. 

RSVP's are requested, please click here to fill out our RSVP form.

Questions? call Sarah Smith 503-653-0015

It is time to plant warm weather veggies!

It's not too late to plant tomatoes! The weather is warm enough to plant all of the warm weather crops, AND it is time to start planning your FALL and WINTER gardens :)

Planting Leeks

The Campbell Community Garden is producing enough produce right now to warrant once a week donations to our Harvest Sharing Garden recipients; soon we will be harvesting twice a week. Last week I chatted with Mary, who is enjoying the veggies I drop off each week; I told her we harvested our first snap peas and there would be more to come for the next several weeks, and that our tomatoes were planted, but quite a ways off from harvesting. She asked me about leeks, telling me that they were a big hit with a lot of people receiving our donations. Our leeks are still many weeks away from harvest time, but they are planted!
Here is a video, filmed a few weeks ago, showing how to plant Bandit and Tadorna Leeks, thanks to Straw Bale Films!



The leeks are growing fast, June 9, 2013



2013 Tomato Planting

Thanks to generous Campbell Garden Sponsors, garden volunteers planted tomatoes and peppers in our Harvest Sharing Garden on May 19th.

Black Gold donated organic fertilizer to help our plants thrive!

Hansen Family Farm is sponsoring our tomato garden again this year by giving us 20 tomato plants and 14 pepper plants. The Hansen's grow an amazing assortment of veggie starts for sale at the Milwaukie Farmers Market on Sundays and at the Oregon City Farmers Market on Saturdays.

While mid-May was still a little early for setting tomato and other warm weather plants directly out into the garden (they really prefer warmer weather), thanks to the generous donation of greenhouse plastic from Naomi's Organic Farm Supply and metal hoops from Family Table Farm, we were able to tuck our tomatoes and peppers into a warm cloche. We will keep the plastic on until the temperatures are consistently warm and the threat of severe rains are past.

We learned a lot in our first year growing veggies to donate through our Harvest Sharing Program. Unusual colored tomatoes didn't go over well with many of our harvest recipients; we would often find the brownish or purplish tomatoes left in the previous weeks donation box; and those colored tomatoes were harder for some of our volunteer pickers to determine ripeness of, resulting in a few tomatoes left to spoil on the vines. This year we are concentrating on growing round, red tomatoes, with just a few colored ones thrown in for variety. Split resistant varieties that will hold up while being transported are important; . Christie Hansen helped us pick out the tomato varieties to grow. See the list below:

Tomatoes

New Yorker

Stupice

Tomatoes and peppers tucked into a cloche.

Yellow Pear

Valley Girl

Dark Orange Muscat

Sweet Million

Snow White

Rutgers

Green Zebra

Momotoro

Taxi

Peppers

California Wonder

Anaheim

Marconi Red

Roumanian Rainbow

Wisconsin Lakes

Jaloro

Early Jalapeno

Serrano

Wenk’s Yellow Hot

Time to Plant

Today is the official start to planting at Campbell Community Garden! We have just a few more paths to finish up, and only 3 plots left to rent.

Celebrate Milwaukie Inc. who operate the Milwaukie Farmers Market (Sundays in Down Town Milwaukie) and Milwaukie Daze (July 27^th to 29^th) are a major sponsor of Campbell Community Garden, they paid for the installation of our fence and gates. I went to the first market day of 2012 and checked out some of the vendors, below is a small sample of what I found. You can see the full vendor list here: http://milwaukiefarmersmarket.com/vendors/

The Hansen Family Farm Booth is a busy place!

Hansen Family Farm: http://www.hansenfamilyfarm.com/index.html  From their website: “We grew over 100 heirloom/open-pollinated Pepper varieties and 125+ varieties of heirloom/open-pollinated Tomatoes in 2011!  Not counting the numerous other garden necessities like heirloom flowers, cucumbers, summer and winter squash, herbs, and melons amongst other rare and hard to find vegetables!”

Here is the list of their list of starts for this year (note they may not all be available every week!) http://www.hansenfamilyfarm.com/garden-starts.html

The veggie starts in the Hansen Family Farm booth have nice descriptive signs, thier website also lists good info about each variety.

Little Brown House Herbary: http://www.facebook.com/littlebrownhouse.herbary I couldn’t find a website for them other than this Face Book page. According to the listing on the Milwaukie Farmers Market vendor list, they are from Boring, Oregon. Their booth at the market had a very nice selection of culinary herbs.

The Little Brown House Herbary booth is full of culinary herbs, nicely tagged with descriptions.

March Biological: http://www.marchbiological.com/ Not a plant vendor, a BUG vendor! March Biological sells beneficial insects (green lacewings and lady bugs) as well as Mosquito Dunks for safely controlling the mosquito population (I really dislike mosquito bites!)

Shoppers line up to look at the lady bugs in the March Biological booth