Geneva Garden Gracefully Glides On

The newest of the Monterey gardens is Geneva and 

it's looking terrific.

Like for instance Janet's spectacular cabbage

and Alek's kaleidoscopic artichoke

put the sun behind Jean and Magy's chard

and you have vividness you wouldn't believe

and Elena and Rigoberto's zucchini flowers are blazing

into fruitiness

 What a gorgeous garden.  

We begin again

Hey everybody, great to see most of you at the annual meeting!  Our new steering committee is up and running and soon you'll see email updates with helpful information, what we're up to and easy things all gardeners can do to contribute to bettering our gardens and community.

For now let's look at some pictures of the bugs that have been moving in to garden East--Armstrong's Garden Center sells thousands of ladybugs and praying mantises and if there's a more fun activity than releasing them into your plot I don't know what it is. They control pests in the most organic and cute way possible. Here are some newborn praying mantises moments after their big release.

Got any pictures and/or stories of what's going on in the garden? Please send them to Hannah or anyone else on the steering committee and we'll blog 'em up.  

A few east garden flowers

Poppies!  Popping up all over.

Lavenderland had a visit from this butterfly

And the colors on the poppies are thrilling

Nora's peas reach for the sky

Hope your garden is coming up rainbows too

The New Geneva Garden!

It's up, it's running and it's full of plants!

Great job everybody who helped make this magic happen

and welcome new gardeners to the Monterey-Geneva

eco-community garden group!  Glad you're here.

This morning at the garden

Karen's tomatoes are, as usual, stunning

Bronwyn and Melissa's fennel is hypnotic

I love water droplets on these kinds of leaves

and Joan's turnip sculptures are laughing it up.

Thanks for a great work day!

Here's a lovely picture of some of our beautiful gardeners. 

What a wonderful crowd and we got so much done!  THANKS EVERYBODY!

Today at the East garden

So pretty, whatever these are called.

This is Joan's poppy

This is Carolyn's dearly departed fruit

These are future plums for us all.

 Things are happening all right.

Today at the (East) garden

Lovely cloudy day. Here's some lavender

and delphinium

and closed delphinium flowers

and hello praying mantis!  Wow your mouth is creepy (no offense).

Praying mantis hid deep in a bush but got photographed again anyway. Here you see him or her rolling his or her eyes about it.

and these two were deep in negotiations about ladybug futures.

Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden (West) featured in the LA Times Home and Garden blog!

At Glendale community garden, a compulsion for compost

October 19, 2011 | 3:42 pm

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 50: Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden (West), Glendale

It’s transition time at the Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden (West) in Glendale, and plot partners Lindsey Hansen and Tom Selling are putting in lettuce, peas, potatoes, onions and garlic. But before anything new got planted, they harvested their most important crop of the year: compost from a pair of stackable bins they got free from the Glendale Integrated Waste Management Section.

Hansen and Selling, at right, are part of a team of seven who have made composting a group project at the garden. Four more Integrated Waste Management compost bins are assembled, but they’re empty or filled with non-composting green waste.

In contrast, the bins of the composting team are full to the brim, an inch-thick layer of dried oak leaves on top. Hansen collected 30 bags of raked detritus from her grandmother’s backyard lawn to serve as a ready supply of material to keep the compost bins’ mixture aerobic and balanced, and the attention to detail has clearly paid off.

(Read the rest here!)

New garden pictures

Here's a lovely rose from the West garden, I think from Melissa's plot.

Pumpkins at the end of their growing cycle, also West.

Gnomes in an unknown stage of their growing cycle, I think West again.

Friendly bee harvesting delicious lavender nectar, East garden.

Adventure ladybug looking like s/he's about to jump off the tiny leaf into the great green unknown, East garden.

Hope to see you at the workday tomorrow (9/17/11)!

Ladybugs, baby

 Got 1500+ of 'em at Armstrongs!  Gosh they're cute.  Here are four of our favorites.

 We released them into the wild of our garden

 So friendly, spotty and unassuming.

Here are two enthusiasts.  Fun on tiny buggy feet.

New garden photos

Lots o' plots

I think this is a plum tree

Nectarine tree

 Bee in lavender

Trowels

Don't forget the seed exchange boxes, everyone!  Please remember to bring seeds to share the next time you go to the garden.