sfgate.com

Go to www.sfgate.com and enter into the search window "perennial vegetables the garden that keeps giving" and you will see the article a few lines down.

root vegies

I forgot to say that you can see the article at sfgate.com. Good photos too.
Charlene

Elkus update

Virginia and I were out to Elkus today for about 4 hours. We cleared all the wood chips out of all beds where tomatoes had been and also the upper basil bed, then we spread the cover crop seed, raked it in, added fresh straw which Leslie kindly gave us, and watered it all in. Then we tackled the raspberry bed. We had to stop before we got all the roots out, but we got a real good start. We actually needed a pickax, which luckily Virginia brought, to get the larger "trunks" out.
We'll continue to work on the raspberry bed in the next couple weeks and will solarize it as we discussed, like the other one, as soon as we can get it completely prepared. I'm going to buy some more plastic for that purpose.

On another subject: did anyone see the Home/Garden section of the Chron from 11/24? Its cover story is really interesting, about perennial vegetables. There are three "exotic" root vegies I had never heard of.."oca", "yacon"and "mashua" all Andean, which I would really like to try at Elkus if others agree. We could plant the oca like the potatoes we're planning, vertically if we want, and if they are a success we can introduce them to the public along with our potatoes at the tasting day. The mashua apparently needs a trellis, and the yacon gets pretty big...we could talk about trying those if we have the room. Let me know what people think. According to the paper, these are all easy to grow and to propate the following year also. Sources for seed are given. It's all mail order, so we should decide soon if we want to get some. See what you think. Thanks,
Charlene

Work Day - Sunday Nov 18

On Sunday, Nov 18, Erin and I spend about 3 hours at Elkus and did the following:

• Irrigation - checked all the beds with help from Erin's hubby Scott. Plugged a few leaks, everything else seemed to be working fine. We took out the batteries and shut the system off for the winter, which means of course that it won't rain for weeks. If things look dry when you are in the garden, do some hand watering.
• From bed 16, there is a line that goes out to the fence. There is also a controller on the hose bib on the fence, but it doesn't work. We should replace this next spring if we want to run irrigation from this valve.
• Weeded the upper beds.
• Trimmed the buddlea. I didn't have my loppers so it could be trimmed some more.

Erin - feel free to add anything I forgot.

STRAWBERRY "THING"

I was talking to my husband about the strawberry thing we were talking about building and he said he would build it; we have lots of scrap plywood around and he loves building things; he would just need a plan. Hope this works.

Log Launch

I created the blog and invited everyone who was at our meeting last night to be a participant. I assume you got an email and boy I hope Google gave you some instructions about how to access the blog and log in.

Feel free to experiment with the blog. Poke around and see what other things we can add as we go alone - picture gallery, list of items we need for the garden, etc. I didn't have any recent pictures so if you have better one, feel free to update the page photo.

Erin and I are planning to be at the garden Sunday about 9 to tackle some of the items. We will post our progress tomorrow.
Melanie