With the kids back in school, refreshing afternoon thunder and lightning storms rolling in, and Starbucks coming out with their seasonal Pumpkin Spice Latte, it would seem we are approaching the high Harvest season! Gather your Harvest, and come to some of our final work parties and upcoming events to share the Harvest love!
How to get your Volunteer Hours in, Log Them and Check Them
Every plot is required to log 12 volunteer hours, or 6 for raised plots or half plots, as stated in the Gardener Agreement. Note: In lieu of completing your hours by Oct 31, $7.00 per hour can serve as your contribution to helping maintain this all-volunteer community garden. We appreciate any and all contributions so we can continue to maintain community spaces of Rose Roots, one of the finest community gardens in the state!
How to Complete your hours: Come to work parties, weed community spaces, check the calendar for upcoming Pollinator Garden maintenance socials, or reach out to Leadership Here if you'd like more direction. We also need help with watering for those who post a sign in their plot, gravel to move from Westside to low areas in the garden, deadheading perennials (save your seeds in a garbage bag for Katie Mies and Patty Sacks to clean, store and sow in the fall and spring) and help with composting.
How to Log your Hours: On the Rose Roots garden Homepage is a link to "Log Hours" or you can also find it Here.
How to Check your Hours: You can go to the Service Teams Page Here to find the link "Check logged Hours" or go directly to the link Here to see how many hours you have logged.
Event Recap
On July 20, approximately 15 volunteers accomplished a variety of tasks totalling 37 hours of work effort! We weeded the south pollinator garden graveled area and beds near the east entrance (thanks to Julie Gleason, Connie Bakerwolff and Aaron Amaya), and weeded and graveled common areas in the garden (Patty Sacks, Bryan Bennett, Katie Meis, Tom Glum, Jim Richards, Brian Seater, and Erin Newton.) At Westside we mowed, weeded path edges, and worked on setting up the trough planters to receive irrigation (thanks to Jack Nix, Jim Richards and John Chisum). Julie Gleason offered training in composting and we made progress at the garden bins and at Westside composting bins. Bonnie Basso assisted Shannon Sawyer on an inventory of plants and plan for the east and west food forest as well as at two other community plots. We will implement it in Spring of 2025. Thanks to all who contributed.
Don't forget to log your hours and rest up for more volunteer opportunities in August.
Gardener Tribute
It is with great sorrow we share that one of our own, Sue Donaldson, has passed after losing her long battle with cancer this week. She has been an active member of the garden for many years, she and her husband Dan contributing in so many ways. On almost any day, Sue could be found in the fresh morning hours or in the cool evenings weeding community plots including the stunning Irises along the front edge and the pollinator garden, helping with produce donations and maintaining our lovely kiosk. The greatest joy she found in the garden, according to Dan, was the friendships she made. Dan said they made her as happy as ridding her garden of the infamous bind weed! Sue will be greatly missed by our garden community and our hearts are with her loving husband Dan and their family. May her spirit be at peace with us always in the garden.
In Memoriam: Please send fond memories of Sue via email to leadership@roserootsgarden.org by August 28. We will compile these into a mosaic to share with gardeners and the community to be displayed on the kiosk she and Dan so lovingly helped maintain for the benefit of our garden community.
News
King Soopers Sponsoring Rose Roots Garden
For all of August and September, Rose Roots has been selected by King Soopers to receive $1 for every $2.50 Fight Hunger bag sold at the 14967 Candelas Parkway King Soopers Location. We think that's what they call a "Toofer", or Two for One, so if you buy a bag, you feed a family and support your favorite garden! Win Win!
How you Can Help: Look out for Fight Hunger bags at your selected King Soopers for the months of August and September and purchase a few!
Support Community Garden Research
Carmen, a nutrition and dietetics graduate student at MSU Denver in her last semester, reached out to us. They are researching community gardens and their impact on mental health as a stress intervention. They would be Infinitely Appreciative if Rose Roots Gardeners can participate in a quick 5-6 minute qualtrics survey. A Bonus: if you participate you will receive a $15 gift card for your participation. You can expect to receive this gift card within the next month. Here is the survey. She has had difficulty getting gardens to participate, so let's help her out!
Photo of the Month
Thank you Adrianna Ivy for sharing this lovely garden harvest photo (right)!
Tips for being a FIVE STAR Garden Neighbor
Garden plants can be unruly sometimes, growing every which way and blatantly ignoring Clear garden plot boundaries. This is where the gardener comes in, gently coaxing a vine back into their own plot, or aggressively eliminating those lovely, but sun-hogging Sunflowers if they are encroaching on neighboring plots. Our garden sunflowers don't even realize there are Other Prominent community gardens who have Outlawed sunflower existence in their boundaries, having caused too many gardening gripes. But Some Sunflowers (who shall not be named) have gotten downright Uppity, and are fixin' to ruin it for all the others.
The Take Home: Community gardening is a great opportunity to teach your plants social skills, thereby allowing their neighbors to thrive too. As a bonus, when you're busy disciplining your sunflowers, and redirecting your vines, and weeding your adjacent garden edges, you might even make new human garden neighbor friends!
Bonus Tip: Share your contact info with your garden neighbors so you can pinch hit for each other watering, weeding, and collecting produce if you become busy, bored, or burned out, which can sometimes happen after a season of battling beastly garden grubs and oppressive inferno afternoons.
Second Bonus Tip: There's no judgement here (but Steve might be judging you, just sayin'. No Steve would never judge anyone. He's Salt of the Earth!), but after all those months of hard work, don't let your lovely produce rot on the vine. Pay a kid $5 to harvest those tiny tomatoes if necessary, if only to support the local economy if you aren't fond of lemonade. Or, set some expectations with your neighbors, and let them know that you've gone to the Galapagos, or are binge watching a new Netflix Series, so they should feel free to harvest your 18 zucchini before they get giant, and weed whack a foot into your forest of dandelions and bind weed encroaching on their plot. Then they won't secretly fume and gossip about your inconsiderate countenance, and then sneak into your plot and steal your prized pumpkin right before Halloween. Win Win!
Gardening Tips: How to Succeed in Gardening without really Trying
We've heard many of you have been thwarted by insects and the heat. Patty Sacks, master Rose Roots gardener, offers tips below and suggests taking a walk around the garden to see what successful plots are doing.
Mulching: Did you know mulching with leaves, grass, pine shavings and straw (available at Murdochs) can lower the temperature of your soil as much as 15 degrees?! If you look at the plots doing really well in the garden, they are mulched. Imagine how happy those tender roots would be if you offered several protective blankets of mulch throughout the season. Not only does a good mulch help retain water and lower the soil temperature, but it enriches the soil as it breaks down. Remember, your garden is only as good as your soil quality!
Fertilize! Did you know tomatoes need to be fertilized every month? Leeks and onions are also heavy feeders. As master gardener Patty Sacks says, you can't just put your plants in and expect them to grow. They are like kids. They are difference species and have different needs. Patty recommends reading Jonny's Seed and Territorial Seed to learn when and how to plant and what fertilizer to use. Note: They have garlic available now to plant in fall. October 10 is the DUG's recommended time to plant garlic.
Shade/Protective Cloth: Our climate can be rough on plants. Murdochs and Gardener Supply have cloth and small hoops to protect seedlings, or just lay shade cloth over your lettuce seedlings to give them a fighting chance against voracious insects, birds stealing your seeds, hail, and early and late frosts.
Planting throughout the Season: Don't feel committed to the plants you planted in April. If something doesn't thrive or is spreading disease (eg. mildew on squash plants), rip it out! It's freeing! Sept 18 to October 10 is the typical last frost date, so you still have 30 to 50 days to grow! Put lettuce, chard, spinach and peas in. Learn how to grow garlic from DUG Here. They recommend planting garlic in mid October. If you cover these plants with frost fabric, you can easily extend the growth of these plants through the end of October, when we typically experience a hard frost.
Organic Applications: Not all bugs are bad. We use Triple Threat nematodes from Arbico Organics, or living biological helpful organisms, to eat the larvae of other pests in Spring and Fall. Neem oil can deter pests, diatomaceous earth can be dusted on leaves to kill off harmful bugs, fungicide can be helpful on tomatoes, flour can deter insects when sprinkled on vegetables to protect their surfaces, and some gardeners use soapy water to deter pests. Remove eggs of squash beetles that are laid on the underside of leaves, pick off tomato horn worms, which can singlehandedly devastate entire plants, and sort through the soil for damaging grubs, if you have the time. These can be the most effective way to save your crops.
Speaking of Pests...
Anna’s Hornworm Roundup - Anna Campbell reported the she and her husband had date night at the garden to test out their new black light flashlight, where they patrolled after sunset and rounded up 18 hornworms, from many of our plots. Anna supplied this photo, and as you can see, hornworms glow in the dark!
Gardener Gratitude
We would like to thank John and Calvin Chisum (remember to wish him a Happy BIG Birthday coming up!) for assisting Patty Sacks with obtaining topsoil, placing topsoil in the Westside troughs and watering it in. We anticipate planting the troughs with Fall blooming annuals and experimenting with sowing seeds for very hardy perennials in the fall.
Thank you to Maggie Alcorn for doing a beautiful job planting the Westside Trough Planters. They are thriving with perennials along with the westside planter strip, which also is growing beautifully. Maggie volunteered at 7:30 am and we managed to finish before 9 am. The troughs look fabulous!
Upcoming Events
Wed August 28: Garden Community Volunteer Work Day: Jason Anderson and his church community will be joining us at 6 pm for a garden maintenance work party followed by a bbq provided by the garden. Please join us! We will have team leads and this work day tends to be among our most productive of the season!
Thurs Sept 5, 5:30-7:30 pm: South Pollinator Garden Work Party. All welcome!
Tues Sept 10, 6-7 pm: All Gardener Monthly Meeting at the Garden (weather permitting)
Thurs Sept 19, 5:30-7:30 pm: South Pollinator Garden Work Party. All welcome!
Sat Sept 21, 5-7:30 pm: Rose Roots Harvest Potluck BBQ and Music in the Garden: Bring a side, sun hat, and a chair and enjoy a Harvest celebration with your fellow gardeners!
Keep up with our Calendar of Events Here.
We look forward to seeing you at the garden! Happy Harvesting!
Rose Roots Leadership Team
Laura Bennett, President
Erin Newton, Vice President
Tom Glum, Treasurer
Shannon Sawyer, Administrator
Gary Williams, Operations Lead
Jim Richards, Operations Lead
Patty Sacks, Special Projects Lead
Jack Nix, Member at Large
Please contact Erin Newton, Newsletter Editor, at erinskinewt@gmail.com with edits or additions to this or future newsletters.
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