Redeemer Education Gardens are the recipient of a grant! This will help support our efforts in the 2016 season! Read about it in the Winona Daily News.
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Beans are starting to come in and just this week we have harvested 12 pounds! We need help harvesting! Please stop by and join us.
Education Gardens has moved! We are now located behind Redeemer Lutheran Church at 1664 Kramer Drive, Winona. This new location should make garden access much easier. We will miss Stone Point Park, but anticipate much fewer deer browsing in our garden patch at this new location.
We are gardening on Monday nights from 5:30 to 7 pm. Please feel free to join us. Everyone is welcome and gardening experience is not necessary. All gardeners share in our produce, and our excess will be donated to the local food pantries and free suppers. Chris Meyer, Winona County Extension Master Gardner Education Gardens is grateful to be a recipient of a 2015 Herman's Garden seed donation from the Seed Savers of Decorah, Iowa. This is over a hundred dollars worth of seed which was not sold in the 2014 season but is still viable. The Herman's Garden program gives to community and education gardens who freely share the produce with people in need - just like Education Gardens! You can learn more about this program at the Seed Savers web site http://www.seedsavers.org/Education/Seed-Donation-Program/ Submitted by Chris Meyer, Extension Master Gardener We grew and distributed over 1300 pounds of produce in 2014. We estimate our food reached over 350 people through the St. Charles Food Shelf, the Winona Volunteer Services Food Pantry, The Winona Middle School, Souper-Suppers at the 1st Congregational Church Winona, Catholic Worker House, and to the 50+ gardeners that worked with us over the summer. We taught and did gardening with 250 7th graders from the Winona Middle School; who did our seed starting and planted our garden. We also held 6 public workshops and gave a number of garden tours. Thanks to everyone who made our 2014 program a complete success. If you want to garden with us in 2015, send us a note through our contact form. We'll be organizing for next year in early 2015. Submitted by Chris Meyer, Winona County Extension Master Gardener Extension Master Gardener Deb Martin-Fedderson and worshop attendees built a vermicomposter using items you probably have around your home (except for the worms of course)! This is a fun and easy way to compost your food scraps year round, and use the resulting tea to help your house plants and garden. It was a great workshop, and if you are interested in building a composter check out this link from the University of Michigan. Submitted by Chris Meyer, Winona County Extension Master Gardener Marianne Hohenner explains how using a row cover can extend the growing season in Southeastern Minnesota at her Stone Point Gardening Workshop. Her preparation for the workshop led her to the forecast for the remaining months in this area which is predicted to have below normal temperatures with precipitation above normal. The National Climatic Data Center gives the Winona area a typical 168 day frost-free growing season. Frost can be expected from October 8 through April 23.
If a surprise frost catches a person unaware, the garden plants and fruit blossoms can be protected by washing off the frozen dew with a hose or sprinkler can of cool water. Just as in spring, large cartons, sheets and blankets can be used in preparation for a frost. For the difficult plants to cover, turn on the sprinklers because that will maintain the temperature at above freezing. Hotbeds and cold frames were commonly used in the garden by the settlers from Europe to extend their number of gardening days but began to disappear when railroads began to transport cheaper produce from the South in the 1870’s. Extending the growing season depends on the hours of a day. Plants will not grow if the day length drops below ten hours. Our growing zone drops below ten hours around November 4-5 and resumes about 10 hours around February 6. Marianne offered information about how to extend a growing season by selecting vegetables that tolerate cool weather, planting in raised buds, planting the garden facing south, using plastic jugs or fiberglass cones to cover young plants, watering regularly and harvesting often and controlling soil and air temperature with mulches and row covers. She introduced a product called “Walls-O-Water” which she has used successfully in her own garden. She went on to give more details about raised beds, cloches, hoop houses and cold frames. Mulches were mentioned but with cautions having to do with soil temperatures. She lead a discussion about using information that can be found on seed packets and gave general plant requirements for a number of vegetables. Mentioning root crops brought up the fact that some root crops can be left in the ground and harvest through the winter if adequately covered. Finally, Marianne led the group to the garden where everyone joined in to set up a row cover and plant radish and carrot seeds which will hopefully be harvested before the snow flys. Submitted by Tom Kujawa, University of Minnesota Extension Master Gardener. We've started harvesting crops, and through mid-August have donated 194 lbs of cabbage, lettuce, tomato, kohlrabi, okra, green beans and cucumbers to our gardeners, Volunteer Services Food Pantry, St Charles Food Pantry, and the First Congregational Church Souper Thursday suppers. Thanks to all our summer gardeners who have helped us with weeding and harvesting.
Pictured is Paul Trska , an University of Minnesota Extension (Olmsted County) Master Gardener, giving information about weed control. His time with us and the information sheets he provided verified that there are many elements to look for when trying to identify weeds. The first hour helped us realize that even though all grass weeds look similar, various details, which are sometimes microscopic, may be necessary for identification which is necessary to know what method of control is the best to use. He stressed the importance of using the universal control method labeled as Integrated Pest Management (IPM). It is a framework of thought and action using research-based pest management information that takes into account the protection of the environment. Our discussion of the eradication of quackgrass could be used to summarize the methods of control that we talked about: 1) Smother, 2) Solarize, 3) Use an herbicide, 4)Dig/Pull out, 5)Suppress it by growing another crop, 6) Force it to blend in by helping the good grasses/plants to prosper.
He stressed the importance of knowing the weeds you are dealing with because some could be considered good attractors for pollinators, some could be used as a human food source, or some could be beneficial for maintaining the health of soil as with the clovers. The final hour was devoted to questions and trying to identify some weeds brought to the workshop. A tour of the garden followed the workshop with some attendees leaving with fresh produce thanks to Chris Meyer, Stone Point Education Garden Outreach/Fund Raising Manager. Our garden is on a hillside, dropping about 30 feet from the upper to lower corners. Not only that, but the garden above is also on a slope and its water seems to channel to our upper opening. We've had some heavy rains at Education Gardens, and seen quite a bit of soil erosion.
We practice a number of erosion control techniques, contour planting, strips of grass and, there is a berm across part of the upper edge of the garden. Our gardeners helped us extend this berm with bags of leaves held in place by some of our left over stakes. So far for our recent 1 inch rain fall it has kept the water from flowing in and washing out our new lettuce crop. |