This month’s topic list

Click on the links that interest you:

• Welcome to the new RGCF Monthly Garden Guide online newsletter

• Month-by-month suggestions for gardening in NM

• Share your seasonal recipes from the garden

• Starbucks coffee composting test (as reported in Sunset Magazine)

• Winter RGCF Garden news and alerts

• Q & A: Send us your gardening questions & concerns

• Volunteer opportunities in Dec./Jan.

• Searching for Christmas Presence: A poem by Marika Ray

Welcome to RGCF Monthly Garden Guide newsletter

The Maize Maze is over.  The irrigation water has been turned off.  The garden for the most part is at rest.  Plus, (drum roll, please)  I have finally been appointed as your official Community Garden Coordinator. This is a part-time position funded by a grant from the Albuquerque Community Foundation. In case you haven’t met me, my name is Marika Ray.

I have been at the RGCF Community Garden since December 2008. Gardening has been a long-time interest of mine but I will happily admit that I am far from a gardening expert.  Luckily, though, I am a writer by trade so I will be sending you out a monthly online newsletter where we can explore garden topics together.  I will let you know the sources of my information and then you can take those topics and do further research, if you wish.

In RGCF Monthly Garden Guide, I will do my best to give you as many useful tidbits of gardening information and farm news as my time allows.  Although we don’t see each other often, all of us need to establish some good communication and share information.  My hope is that this newsletter will provide each of you with most of the information you need and a place to express yourself so you can have a successful garden.

Since this is the first issue of the newsletter and it’s nearly mid November as I write this and with two major holidays coming up, I’ll combine the information for both November and December here.  So your next issue will come around the first week of January…and will be shorter.

I wish you all a wonderful and bountiful holiday season! Happy Thanksgiving!  Happy Hannukah! Merry Christmas!  Have a Blessed Kwanzaa! Happy New Year!

Month-by-Month Garden Notes for November & December

Condensed from:  Gardening in New Mexico:  A month by month guide by John Cretti (2007) Available at Borders Books locally.

Planning

• Add deciduous leaves or oat straw to your garden but don’t overdo it as it can make your row become gummy. We have put some bales of straw near the fence along the road to the garden and will add more as needed.

• Start a garden journal or a regular notebook where you list problems or concerns that were specific to your row or the plants you grew.  Do this while it’s still fairly fresh in your memory from the season just finished.  Just list a date and brief notes about weather, plants, harvesting date, insect problems, disease problems, etc. We’ll try to answer those concerns in this online newsletter.
• If you have perennial vegetables or fruits be sure to get them some water periodically.  We are setting up a winter supplemental watering tank at the back corner of the Alvarado school garden. The easiest way to do this is to get a wheel barrow from the tool shed and load it up with several watering cans. Then go to the oval tank near the back edge of the Alvarado school garden to fill your cans.  Then take them to your row.  Remember NOT to step on our white irrigation pipe or to roll the wheel barrow over it !
• If your garden performed poorly this year, this might be a good time to do a soil test through our state, university or local Cooperative Extension Office so you can find out how to specifically adjust your soil.

Planting

• Nothing should be planted in November and December.  However, this is a good time to start looking at or gathering seed catalogs to look for the vegetables or herbs you want to grow in the spring.  We will have some free seeds available to gardeners again in 2010 but they are by no means a full line of seeds.  They are the Botanical Interest seeds that did not sell over the 2009 season.  We’ll bring those to the seed closet in March.  Right now they are stored elsewhere to prevent problems with mice.

Care

• If you haven’t done your final garden cleanup, remove the last of the frozen or dead plants.  This is important because insects can harbor their eggs over the winter in decaying plants.  Providing they don’t have seed heads on them and they are NOT diseased, you can put them in the labeled containers near the compost bins.  If they do have seedheads or were diseased, take them down to the south field (at the end of garden towards Montano).

• Prepare the soil for next spring by adding compost, manure or coffee grounds to your row before the ground completely freezes.  This will give it time to break down over the winter to enrich your soil for spring. It’s a good idea to put several inches of these combined amendments on top your soil.
• Gather up and store old pots, plants stakes and other gardening items that are still hanging around in your row.  Be sure to take them home as we don’t have personal storage room at the garden.
• Put straw mulch (available near the water tanks) around perennial vegetables, herbs and fruits like strawberries, rhubarb, sage, mint, chives and the like.  Mulch helps insulate the plants from the extremes of freezing and thawing.

Share your seasonal recipes from the garden

Since this is the first issue of the online RGCF Garden Guide, I will share some of my recipes.  Over the next few months, it will be your turn to share some of your favorites.  Send me your garden recipes for January to me by e-mail at: garden@riograndefarm.org.

Sweet Potato Casserole

I like this recipe. I originally got it from the Taste for Life magazine at Sunflower Markets.   It takes about 15 minutes of prep time plus an hour or more to bake the sweet potatoes.  The recipe serves 10-12 so perhaps it might be a good easy dish for your Thanksgiving or Christmas meal. Plus, it’s more naturally sweetened with pineapple rather than processed marshmallows. I like that!

Ingredients

• 6 large sweet potatoes
• 1 can (20 oz.) crushed pineapple, packed in juice
• 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• 1 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil, sesame seed oil or melted butter
• 1 cup of chopped pecans (optional)

Directions: Bake sweet potatoes on a cookie sheet at 375 degrees for about an hour or until easily pierced with a fork. When cool enough to handle safely, cut potatoes in half.  Scoop out the flesh, discarding the skins. Mash the sweet potato pulp with a masher or use an electric mixer on low until smooth. Stir in pineapple and juice plus optional cinnamon and oil or melted butter. Spoon mixture in a lightly oiled casserole dish or a 9” x 13” baking dish.  Sprinkle with optional nuts on top. Cover and bake for 40 minutes.  Serve immediately.

Raw Beet Salad

I love this recipe and grow beets in my garden. For me it’s almost like dessert and very simple to make.

Besides, beets are good for you because they are high in folic acid, potassium, calcium and antioxidants (betacyanin, which is what gives beets their rich red color). Beets are also known for cleansing the kidneys and gallbladder and for restoring health to these organs as well as the liver.

I scrub them well with a vegetable brush and leave the skins on the outside and chop them up for my salad in a food processor. I do prefer organic ingredients and recommend you get them, too.

Ingredients (makes approx. 2 cups)

• 2 medium sized beets chopped (with the skins on but greens and root tips cut off)
• 2 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice
• 2 Tablespoons of olive oil or flax oil
• 1-2 Tablespoons of honey, maple or agave syrup
• ½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon (optional)
• A handful of blueberries, cranberries, goji berries or raisins (optional)

Directions :  Chop your beets in a food processor and put them in a medium sized bowl. Sprinkle the lemon juice, oil and optional cinnamon over the chopped beets.Add dried fruit, if desired over the top and stir with a spoon. Test your beet salad to see if you want to add honey, maple or agave syrup. Serve or refrigerate for use later.

The Starbucks coffee compost test (as reported in Sunset magazine)

Lab report: Those free grounds really are good for your soil

Used coffee grounds make good soil amendments. That’s the buzz among gardeners lately. But what do your coffeepot’s leftovers really add to the soil?

To find out, Sunset sent a batch of Starbucks’ used coffee grounds ― the company gives them away for free ― to a soil lab for analysis. Turns out the grounds provide generous amounts of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, and copper. They also release nitrogen into the soil as they degrade. And they’re slightly acidic ― a boon in the Western climate. Dig or till them into the soil to a depth of 6 to 8 inches.

(NOTE added by Marika:  November and December are the best times to add the coffee grounds as it will give them enough time to break down and make their nutrients available to your plants in the spring.)

FULL REPORT The following information was developed for Sunset by Soil and Plant Laboratory Inc., Bellevue, WA.

Summary: Use of Starbucks coffee grounds in amending mineral soils up to 35 percent by volume coffee grounds will improve soil structure over the short-term and over the long-term. Use of the coffee grounds at the specified incorporation rates (rototilled into a 6- to 8-inch depth) will substantially improve availabilities of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper and will probably negate the need for chemical sources of these plant essential elements. The nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium “guaranteed analyses” would be as follows for the coffee grounds:

Nitrogen: 2.28 percent

Phosphorus: 0.06 percent

Potassium: 0.6 percent

Available nutrient levels: The pH or reaction of the coffee grounds is considered slightly acidic and in a favorable range at 6.2 on the pH scale. Salinity (ECe) is a measurement of total soluble salts and is considered slightly elevated at 3.7 dS/m.

The primary water-soluble salts in this product are potassium, magnesium, sodium and chloride. The potentially problematic ions in sodium and chloride are each sufficiently low as to be inconsequential in terms of creating problems for plants. The availabilities of nitrogen, calcium, zinc, manganese and iron are quite low and in some cases deficient.

Thus, the coffee grounds will not supply appreciable amounts of these essential plant elements when used as a mineral soil amendment. However, the availabilities of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper are each sufficiently high that there will be a very positive impact on improving availabilities of these elements where the coffee grounds are used as a mineral soil amendment.

The coffee grounds will negate the need for additional sources of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper when blended with mineral soils. In summary, the available plant essential elements which will be substantially improved where the coffee grounds are used as a soil amendment, include phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper.

Total nutrient levels: Each cubic yard of these coffee grounds contains a total of 10.31 lbs. nitrogen, of which 0.01 lb. (0.09%) are available. Thus, even though available nitrogen is considered deficient in this product, there still remains over 10 lbs. of total nitrogen per cubic yard of coffee grounds.

Thus, nitrogen is primarily bound in the organic fraction and is unavailable to plants until soil microorganisms degrade the organic fraction. Through this process, the nitrogen is converted to plant available forms.

Over the long term the coffee grounds will act like a slow release fertilizer providing long-term nitrogen input which can then be utilized by plants. Nearly all potassium and all magnesium are in the available forms.

This means that immediate availability improvements for these two elements will take place when the coffee grounds are blended with mineral soils. About half of the copper and calcium are in their immediately available forms. All other plant essential elements are primarily bound in the organic fraction and will thus be subject to slow release over time as soil microbes continue to degrade the organic fraction.

Physical properties: Virtually all particles passed the 1 millimeter (mm) screen resulting in a product which is very fine textured. Each cubic yard of the coffee grounds will supply an excellent amount of organic matter, measured at 442 lbs. organic matter per cubic yard. At the use rates indicated in this report, the input of organic matter will be substantial and will result in considerable short-term and long-term improvement of mineral soil structure.

Carbon/nitrogen ratio: On the basis of dry matter bulk density (452 lbs. per cubic yard), organic matter content (97.7%) and total nitrogen (2.28%), the estimated carbon/nitrogen ratio is about 24:1. This means that there is more than sufficient nitrogen present in the coffee grounds to provide for the nitrogen demand of the soil microorganisms as they degrade the organic fraction.

Use rate: Based on the overall chemistry and physical properties of the coffee grounds, they can be utilized at rates similar to other organic amendments when used in amending mineral soils. These data indicate that 25-35 percent by volume coffee grounds can be blended with mineral soils of any type to improve structure of those soils.

Source: http://www.sunset.com/garden/earth-friendly/starbucks-coffee-compost-test-00400000016986/

Winter RGCF community garden news and alerts

Recent vandalism to shade structure

Since our recent frost at the community garden, many of you may not know it but we have had some vandalism to the shade structure.  Some of the shade cloth has been pulled off and some boards ripped off plus some other water tank mayhem.. Thanks, Arana, for letting me know. Open Space police will now be patrolling.

We also lost a number of the shorter pitch forks and shovels earlier this year. Please make sure you lock the padlock on the tool closet every time you leave. Instructions are posted on the door now. We are considering having every gardener pay a small tool and equipment maintenance fee. We have a mower, a tiller and pump that need regular maintenance so that would help offset those expenses. We’ll let you know more about that later.

If any of you are ever at the garden and notice any kind of vandalism, please let me know as soon as possible. You can call me at my office at home at 994-9521 (please leave a message if I am not in) or e-mail me at garden@riograndefarm.org. I am now keeping a log of these incidents so that we can document how often and what types of things are happening.

Winter gardening and watering needs

There are currently about 20 rows at the garden with winter crops. Since this is the first year we have had winter gardening, we have had to re-think our water resources. We will be moving one of the smaller oval water tanks to the backside of the Alvarado Elementary School garden area.

This area is adjacent to the 16-acre field behind the community garden where a sub-surface drip irrigation system is being installed. There is currently a relief valve there that is connected to a well near the new green pump house. We will fill that tank as needed so that winter gardeners can water their crops from this tank.

We recommend that you gather several watering cans and transport them to that tank in a wheelbarrow from the tool shed. Then, you can fill your watering cans and wheel them back to your row to water. Please make sure that you don’t deplete the tanks with fish and plants in them this winter. If the water gets too low in any of the tank inline with the tool shed, it will affect their survival. Let me know if you see these tanks are getting too low.

Q & A: Send us your gardening questions & concerns

Since each of us has different schedules, it’s often hard to find a way to get timely information to everyone at the community garden.   I hope you will send me some of your questions and concerns about gardening at RGCF.

This is the first issue of the RGCF Monthly Garden Guide so please e-mail me (at garden@riograndefarm.org) with any questions you have about organic gardening, issues you need help with, suggestions for doing things better and the like and I’ll do my best to cover them here.

Anyone good at fixing or maintaining equipment?

Right now our tiller isn’t working properly so we have not been able to till rows.  For some reason, it isn’t digging into the soil and appears to be just walking over the soil and not digging in.  If anyone could help with that, we’d deeply appreciate it and we can put the time toward your 2-hour per month commitment so let me know if you have those skills.  Just e-mail me at garden@riograndefarm.org or call me at 994-9521.

Upcoming Workshops

Rio Grande Community Garden in collaboration with the Buzz Action Garden at Harwood Arts Center and The Gardener’s Guild will offer a series of five garden workshops in 2010.  There will be one each in February, March, April, June and August.  Watch for more information in this newsletter.

Volunteer opportunities in Dec./Jan.

I have to be out of town the first part of December.  When I come back I’d like to see if some of  you would volunteer to help me with the following projects.  We can do these on a Saturday between 10 a.m. and Noon.

• Clean out the tool shed and organize it.
• Mow the common area around the hedgrerows and paths.
• Remove weeds and other debris around all areas of the garden.
• Put plastic sleeves around the hedgerow plants to protect them from lawn mower cuts and knicks.  (Save any 1-gallon size plastic milk or juice bottles.  We can cut off the tops and bottoms and then slit the sides to put around the bases of the trees or plants.)

I’ll send out dates for these tasks after I return.

Special Thanks to our 2009 Volunteers

I’d like to thank all the volunteers that helped us in the garden last year.  These folks showed a great deal of dedication and selflessness in helping out with the many chores that need to be taken care of so that all of us could have what we needed to make our gardens grow.

They all showed up weekly to do the respective jobs. I deeply appreciate their hard work and commitment to taking on these responsibilities.  If you see them or meet them, please give them your personal thanks as well.  All of them are fellow gardeners unless otherwise noted.

Water Tank Fillers: Ed Stevens, Colwyn and Joe Gullick, Sessin and Lorna Durgham

Back-up tank fillers: Les Peterson, Chuck Wood, KC Gonzales, Matt Menich (farm intern)

Irrigation Pump Maintenance: Les Peterson

Irrigation Crew: Robert Nagel (master gardener and head irrigator), Elisea Garcia, Colwyn Gullick, Ann Doyle, Megan Wolf, Matt Menich (farm intern)

Compost Turning & Maintenance: Julie Kutz and Dave Schott

Education Volunteers: Heidi Anderson

Compost and Worm Box Maintenance: Heidi Anderson

Path Maintenance: Julie Kutz, Renuka and Francisco Vajrakarur

Mower Maintenance: Lou Bouttino

Volunteer Weeders: Mike and Kara Lanctot and their family of nine kids

Interim Community Garden Communications: Harriet Meek

Wednesday Tank Filling Crew: ARCA Volunteers headed by Monica and Mary with Charles, John, Melinda, Ernesto, David, Max, Jason

Common Area Maintenance: Matt Menich (farm intern), Sam, Rachel and Maren (summer interns) and Deb Brubaker (former assistant farmer)

If I left anyone out, it was inadvertent.  I try to keep good records so just let me know if I missed anyone and I’ll acknowledge them in the next newsletter.  As you can see there is a lot more work that gets done and people that help out than most people realize.  That’s the reason we’re having everyone contribute at least two hours a month in the community garden starting in 2010.

Searching for Christmas Presence

Written by Marika Ray in collaboration with the little angels & elves

While I wandered weak and weary

Shopping for gifts, trying to be cheery…

Is this the right thing?  No,  maybe it’s that!

I know, everyone could use gloves and a hat!

No that’s not right, it sounds perfectly boring!

If they get those as presents, they’ll all be snoring!

Why is it every time I shop, I question myself?

My taste is no good.  What I need is an elf!!

Elf, are you there??  I need help with my list.

You’re into magic…so maybe you can assist.

“Thanks for the request. I’d be happy to help,”

He said. “Let’s go to the beach for beds of kelp!”

“Kelp, Kelp!!??” I said.  “If that isn’t the living end!!

Like, “I’ll get by with a little KELP from my friends?”

I shuddered in pure and utter exasperation.

“No, I need perfect gifts…not exacerbation!!”

“Oh, perfect gifts!  Why didn’t you say so?

I know the perfect thing to make their hearts glow!”

He exclaimed waving his tiny arms up above.

“How about a piece of yourself wrapped in love?”

“Great!!  Now you want me to chop myself in pieces??

How ugly! What say we give sausage and cheeses?”

“No!” he interrupted me. “I mean give your presence!

It’s not about wrapped gifts you purchase at expense.

It’s gifts given from your heart to touch another’s soul.

Inspiration for joy and laughter is the one and only goal.

Look deep inside yourself.  What’s unique to only you?

Share your inner gifts. Build your friendships anew!

What it all boils down is a matter of good spelling!

Presence with a “C”…it keeps life so sweet smelling!

So remember as you bustle through your shopping

Give pause for some silence and think about stopping!”

With a wink and a nod my Christmas elf was gone.

His presence that day deserved more than a yawn.

So I headed back to the house to write this poem

And put it in a Christmas card to send to your home.

Merry Christmas to all!