Thank You!

The grand opening tomato planting party was a success! No rain, a little sun, and 28 tomato plants, plus cucumber, watermelon, and summer squash all planted in our harvest donation beds.

The grand opening was well attended, and it didn't rain!

THANK YOU to all of the gardenrs who spent time getting Campbell Community Garden ready for it's public debut. It is very rewardign to see how much our garden has grown since we started planting on June 1st.

THANK YOU to all of our garden sponsors, donors, and supporters. Your help made the building of the garden possible. Your contributions have gone far to improve our neighborhood and community.

Garden supporters help plant tomatoes. L-R: Milwaukie City Manager, Bill Monahan; CCG Gardener, Judy Kiepke; North Clackamas School District Assistant Supperintendant, Ron Stewart; Landscape East & West's, Cindy Capparelli; and Milwaukie Community Services Director, JoAnn Herrigel.

Grand Opening of Campbell Community Garden

Grand Tomato Planting Party

Friday June 22nd, 4:00pm

Rather than a traditional ground breaking ceremony in the April rain, we decided to celebrate the opening of Campbell Community Garden with a Tomato Planting Party. Please join us in the garden for tours, refreshments, and help us get our produce donation program going by planting a tomato plant in one of our community plots.

Parking is available in the Campbell Elementary parking lot at 11326 SE 47th Avenue, Milwaukie 97222. The garden is located at the upper NE corner of the school grounds.

Thank you to Hansen Family Farm for donating tomato plants for our Grand Tomato Planting Party!

Garden Construction Nearly Complete!

Once all of our paths are coverd with cardboard and wood chips, we can say we are done with the construction phase of Campbell Community Garden. As long as we get our planned wood chip delivery tomorrow, we will be done with construction by the end of the weekend!

Work days are planned for Thursday June 14th from 3:30 to 7pm and Saturday from 10am to Noon, our grand opening celebration will be at 4pm on Friday June 22nd.

Campbell Community Garden, June 12, 2012

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

Gardens For Rent

There are only four plots left to rent for the 2012 growing season!

There are two 10 x 10 foot plots available, $40 for the year, and two 4 x 12 foot plots, $30 for the year. Sign up on the Registration page.

We have two more construction work days scheduled: Wednesday (5/30) and Thursday (5/31) 3:30pm to 7pm. We will finish building the paths and cover them with wood chips; all to prepare ourselves for the first day of planting: June 1st!

CCG gardeners work together to build garden plots.

Garden Work Days

The total volunteer hours donated to the construction of Campbell Community Garden as of today is 243 hours! This is for construction only, there have been many more hours donated in the planning phase. Thank you to the hard work of all of our dedicated volunteers.

This weekend we need more help! We are on the home stretch of construction, the main tasks left to complete before planting day are installing the cedar bed frames and building the paths. Please be a part of breaking the 300 volunteer hours donated mark!

Work Day schedule:

Today, Thursday May 24th, 3:30 to 7pm: moving mulch, setting bed frames, and covering the paths with cardboard and mulch

Saturday May 26th, 10am to 2pm Moving mulch, setting bed frames, and covering paths with cardboard and mulch.

Wear work gloves, and clothing appropriate fort he weather, we will be working rain or shine. If you have a shovel, wheel barrow, cordless drill/driver, bring it. Please RSVP so I will know how many people to expect. 503-313-0638

Milwaukie Lumber delivers to Campbell Community Garden

We continue to make fast progress towards planting day at Campbell Community Garden. Between Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon CCG volunteers put in 96 hours of work removing sod, hauling compost, and tilling the planting beds.

On Monday morning we had two big stacks of cedar delivered to the garden. A reduced price and free delivery by Milwaukie Lumber, a donation from Greg "Frank" and Michelle Hemer, and $500 from the the Clackamas County Master Gardeners Gray Thompson Community Projects Grant Program, allowed us to purchase enough cedar to edge all of our paths and planting plots. The edging will help to reduce the time needed to keep the beds from encroaching into the paths, making the garden easier to maintain. Our next work day, Saturday May 19th (10am to 1pm) will be spent installing the edging.

Glad we planned a wide gate! The fork lift delivery saves our volunteers the work of hauling the lumber from the street.