Melrose Gardens

05/05/2021

Hello everyone! Gardening season is well underway, and I’ve been busy with a few other ventures, but I want to make sure to introduce to you the new manager of Melrose Gardens, Megan Osika! Megan was a regular volunteer with us last year, has a background in botany which will be a wonderful asset to the garden, and has already begun the work of continuing to build infrastructure. While she takes the reins, I will be stepping back to a volunteer role. It has been a pleasure getting to know many of you over the past couple years, and I am so glad Melrose will carry on as a community resource in the future!

Heather

04/18/2021

Hi gardeners! I plan on doing a work day from 12-2 if you want to cone out and help at the garden. We got 15 yards of dirt delivered and the garden boxes need filked up! Bring some gloves, and i have tools. Its such a nice day out!

08/08/2020

Hi gardeners! We will be having another gardening help day on Sunday, August 16 at 9:00. We have got one more raised bed to shovel soil into, and I was given eight feed bags of rabbit p**p from a friend as well as more compost from my microgreen growing friends. These have been minimally mixed into the raised beds, but we will need help integrating this better before sowing some ground cover seeds and leaving it for fall and winter. I would also like to get cardboard down behind and between the back beds so that we can stomp out these weeds. It should be another nice and easy day if we get a good turnout, and might be the last volunteer day of the season. Hope to see you there ❤️🌱

07/31/2020

A little update from your favorite community garden: sunflowers are getting huge, harvests are growing, and the back 2/3 is more or less handled for the season 😍 So grateful to the volunteers who made all this a reality this year. We plan to donate most of this food this year, and use donated food leftovers from Food Not Bombs for compost to improve the soil next year. Next year around February plots will be assigned to neighborly gardeners, so stay tuned here!

07/12/2020

After the garden received eight cubic yards of topsoil from the Columbus Land Bank program for free (!), we were able to get most of it into the remaining eight raised beds today! We have enough left over to top off the other beds after we’ve cleared them for the season. Luckily the soil delivery truck narrowly missed our chokecherry tree, who appreciates life a little more now. As a result, we plan to install brightly colored signage near each of our trees soon. Next year all the beds will be overflowing and the trees twice as tall, we can’t wait!

07/03/2020

07/01/2020

Coffee grounds pickup day is a thing now and we are grateful to Florin Coffee for so generously obliging us! Buckets and buckets of black gold to be added to our soil - and I’ll use this as an excuse to support a community business that supports other community businesses. This caffeine sensitive consumer is all about their mixed berry muffins!

-Heather

https://www.facebook.com/florincoffee/

06/28/2020

We had a great garden day/glute workout at Melrose today ❤️ The front wildflowers have been mostly weeded, 2/3 of the tomato/onion beds are doing beautifully, and the random potatoes “planted”by squirrels are actually really happy below the maple tree. Sheet mulching is mostly done just in time for a soil delivery next week. It’s all fun and no work from here on out 😉

06/25/2020

We are having another volunteer day this Sunday at 9:00! Hoping to have a large turnout to finish sheet mulching the back in a flash and do the back raised beds as well. If you’ve got a shovel, bring it - and if you have a wheelbarrow, we can use that too to put two or three assembly lines together at once. That will put us in absolutely wonderful shape!

The garden was also lucky enough to win 10 cubic yards of topsoil (~$500 in value including delivery!) because I was the first to reply to an email from the Land Bank - how amazing 🤩 so if that arrives by then, we can throw that in the beds. Then, somehow, we will have achieved the improbable status of “done for now”... I don’t know what I’ll do with myself! Read? Nap? The possibilities are endless! See you Sunday, friends. ❤️🌱

Heather

06/23/2020

A huge thank you goes out to Noel for helping with the garden today! We cleared the last of the brush from the fenceline and sheet mulched another good chunk. Two more sheet mulching sessions and we can move on to prep the last of the raised beds. I’m so grateful to my community for stepping up in a big way to make this dreamy idea a reality. That last shot is from April 23 of last year - and that is unbelievable.

06/18/2020

This may not look a ton different from the last post, but trust me, it’s different! We’ve probably got two to three more cardboarding sessions before we’re done with this chapter. (I’m trying not to get too used to the crispy clean look of this, as that’s just not the reality of a food forest) Big thanks to Dan and Megan for taking a couple hours out of their weeknight to play cardboard Tetris and build plant-related community 💪 And a big thank you to our microgreen friends Capital City Greens for the delivery of spent soil from their greens - the difference between the beds with a base layer of these greens and those without is obvious. We have amazing neighbors!

Next up on our food forest agenda: layer three! Bushes 🤩

-Heather