Gardening classes through Willy Street Co-op

Jay and I are members of the Willy Street Co-op (for those not in Madison, that's a large natural food coop in town). I eagerly read the monthly newsletter, first for the letters to see who's complaining about what, and second, for the classes. The end of February and March are full of garden class options. Here are some to consider.

The Urban Gardener Part I: Laying the Groundwork for a Productive Year
Willy East - Monday, Feb. 27, 6 - 8 pm

Willy West, Wednesday, March 21, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Willy East - Monday, April 2, 6 - 8 pm

Learn how to produce more organic vegetables in your garden! This class will focus on intermediate and advanced gardening skills such as garden planning and layout, crop rotation and cover cropping, planting schedules and succession planting for maximum production, and the top tips for a productive garden from Troy Community Farm. Each participant will take home FarmWorks' newly released Vegetable Planting Calendar.

The cost is $20 for Owners and $30 for all others. Payment is required at registration; please register by stopping at the Willy East Customer Service desk or by calling 251-6776.

The Urban Gardener Part II: Seed Starting at Home
Troy Gardens - Saturday, March 10, 10:00am - 12:00pm
Starting your own seeds isn’t as hard as you think! Come visit the new passive solar greenhouse at Troy Gardens and go home ready to start seeds. You will learn how to mix your own soil, build an inexpensive seed starting rack for your home, and learn the basics of starting seeds indoors in a small space. Topics covered include seed starting schedule, soil mix recipes, tray options, seeding and planting techniques, growing conditions, hardening off, and an introduction to our favorite varieties. All participants will take home several plant starts. Additional supplies will be available for purchase after class. Class takes place in the greenhouse at Troy Gardens, 502 Troy Drive.

Payment is required at registration; please register by stopping at the Willy East Customer Service desk or by calling 251-6776.

Seed Starting with Charles Dykman

Willy East

Sunday, March 25, 9:00am - 12:00pm

Thursday, March 29, 6 - 9 pm

Editorial note: I took this class several years ago. Charles is a font of tomato knowledge and shares it freely, and he welcomes gardening newbies.

Instructor Charles Dykman will share the proper techniques for starting tomato plants from seed through a hands-on experience in our Community Room. Charles has been raising vegetables on Madison's east side since 1967 and shares his wealth of knowledge with participants in this class. Additional information provided will include finding the seeds you want, seed saving, how to plant and water seeds, initial and garden transplantations, and artificial light. Class participants will go home with their own tomato plant starter. This class is limited to 12 students per session, and is a perennial favorite, so sign up early!

Cost is $10 for Owners and $20 for all others. Payment is required at registration; please register by stopping at the Willy East Customer Service desk or by calling 251-6776.

Introduction to Forest Gardening

Willy West - Monday, March 19, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Learn ways to transition the blank slate of your backyard into an edible ecotopia by co-creating the design of a backyard forest garden. We will cover a variety of topics with an emphasis on site preparation and design for spring plantings. Other topics we will cover based on the interests of the group include: understanding plant guilds and plant community functions, plant species and site selection criteria, understanding plant needs and yields, and troubleshooting management strategies using participant case studies. We will help you look at your garden design with a systems perspective from the ground up and see how we can design our backyards and gardens in the image of an ecosystem. Cost is $15 for Owners and $25 for all others. Please register by stopping at the Willy West Customer Service desk or by calling 284-7800.

Classes, classes and more classes

I'm sure my dad had great educational resources in from the local extension office, magazines and the Old Farmer's Almanac. Last year except for asking my mom for a bit of mulch advice, I didn't actively seek information about gardening. And then the emails and class postings started to come my way and I'm finding so many cool things to learn about, and so many cool people to teach the stuff. 

So I'm going to start a series of what look like great educational resources. Most of these have fees, but they are small, and often you get to take something home - I mean, check out the hoop house class, you get a hoop house to take home! If you know of others, send 'em my way and I'll add them to the list.

3 and 4 Season Hoophouse Construction - March 17 (I'm totally going to this one)

With the growing season fast approaching, Fitchburg Fields aims togive local gardeners the self-reliance skills necessary to reduce our
impact on the earth. Here are some details about our upcoming
workshops:

Extend Wisconsin's growing season by building your own 3 or 4 season mini-hoophouse. Expert gardener Nox Seehafer will show you how, and tell you the secret of harvesting root crops all winter long. The hoophouse can be used to protect early spring crops, grow seedlings, or let you overwinter hardy greens.

All supplie and tools are provided, and handouts too! You will need to supply boards or stones to weigh down the plastic cover and blanket. Delivery of your hoophouse in the Madison area may be available for a small fee - please email fitchburgfieldsintern@gmail.com if you would like to register but need
assistance to get your hoophouse home.

For more details and registration visit - www.fitchburgfields.org/main/541

Crop Family Specifics: Brassicas and Solanaceae (no surprise, going to this too)
Two specialized classes will be scheduled this summer. Troy Gardens  Farm Manager, Claire Strader, and Educator/Manager, Megan Cain, of  Farmworks will be giving two 2-hour demonstration/talks on culture of  specific families in my yard in rural Middleton. Claire and Megan will  reveal how to get the most out of your cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, then your tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants.

My backyard is a functional suburban food production plot. With  chickens, bees, orchard, berry bushes and extensive garden, it's a tour in itself.

June 19 (brassicas) and July 17 (solanaceae) 6-8 pm
In my backyard, rural-suburban Middleton

These two classes will cost $26/person (total for both). Class will be limited to 20 participants. Your check, made out to Betsy True, will hold your spot. Email for address.

Getting ready for gardening

With seed catalog in one hand, you can't imagine my delight when I read through the newest Willy Street co-op monthly newspaper that they are offering two classes to get ready for spring planting. I particularly like the title of both, “The urban gardener part 1 and part 2," so I thought I'd share the details. If you live in Madison, these would be great classes to attend, and I would love your company: I already signed up for both! To register for one or both, call Willy East at 251-6776. For more information about classes, see www.willystreet.coop/calendar

The urban gardener part 1: laying the groundwork for a productive year
Monday, Feb. 27, 6 PM to 8 PM, at Willy Street Coop, East.

Learn how to produce more organic vegetables in your garden. This class will focus on intermediate and advanced gardening skills such as garden planning and layout, crop rotation and cover cropping, planting schedules and succession planning for maximum production, and the top tips for productive garden from Troy community farm. Each participant will take home far works newly revised vegetable planting calendar. The cost is $20 for owners, and $30 for all others.

The urban gardener part 2: seed starting at home
Saturday, March 10, 10 AM to 12 PM at the Troy Gardens greenhouse, 502 Troy Drive.

Come visit the new passive solar greenhouse at Troy Gardens and go home ready to start seeds. You will learn how to mix your own soil, build an inexpensive seed starting rack for your home, and learn the basics of starting seeds indoors in a small space. Topics covered include seed starting schedule, soil mix recipes, tray options, seating and planting techniques, growing conditions, hardening off, and an introduction to our favorite varieties. All participants will take home several plant starts. Class takes place in the greenhouse of Troy Gardens, 502 Troy Dr. The cost for owners is $18 and $28 for all others.

I bought plants at the annual Troy Gardens sale on a cool foggy morning last spring. Here are a few photos.

The greenhouse was wonderfully damp and warm on an otherwise gray and cold May day (you may recall what a cool spring we had last year!)

Functional and beautiful, the greenhouse is made with traditional and "naturally" sourced materials giving it a wonderful earthy crunchy feel. Or was the gravel underfoot?

Friends Britt and Abby. They are also gardeners at the American Family Insurance Community Garden.

Troy Gardens starts plants for their own community garden and CSA farm, and sells extras.

The Troy Gardens Community Garden was a magical place even on a cold spring morning.

Update to plant hardiness zones map

Browsing seed catalogs for spring planting? The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a Plant Hardiness Zone Map that shows zones, which are usually indicated on plant or seed packet labels.

The zone map has been updated, here's the Wisconsin map, the US map and a link to it online.
Link to USDA's site where you can get state-specific maps.

CAC article about... AmFam's garden and me!

I got to know a few members of Community Action Coalition (CAC) by reading their articles on the Madison Area Master Gardener listserv, meeting people at the autumn gardener pot luck and at the 2011 Madison "bioneers" conference. My blog caught their attention, and I was interviewed in November for an article in the latest CAC newsletter. Here's a link to the newsletter and the article on page 2 and continuing to page 4. I hope you enjoy reading the article as much as I enjoyed getting to know the fine folks at CAC this year.

American Family Gothic - autumn 2011

(CAC) works to develop economic and social capacities of individuals, families and communities to reduce poverty in Dane, Jefferson and Waukesha Counties. One way they do this is by encouraging urban gardening of all shapes and sizes.

Top 10 worst gardening gifts

Today, a blog post I didn't write, but is garden-related and timely with the gift-giving season in full force. Please enjoy the following truly awful gardening gifts (and explanations of why not to buy them!)

Winterizing an urban garden

Autumn work on the farm and autumn in the city are so very different, yet vaguely similar. Here's a few things I found in common -- sort of. I also wrote a poem about how I'm feeling about this autumn.


Water

Empty herb bed and missing rain barrel.

On the farm, getting water to garden and animals was literally a matter of life or death for flora and fauna. We had hoses stretched out to barns and gardens from spring through autumn. But as temperatures threatened a sustained freezing or below, we drained hoses and stored them in the barn to prevent bursting over winter.

In the city, we cleaned out the rain barrels, reinstalled the downspouts and drained 25 feet of hose.

Newly installed rain barrel (and lots of bed-making material)

Garden beds
My dad spent autumn days harvesting corn and prepping fields for the crop the following spring. My brothers and I helped clean out the garden, heap dead plant material on the compost pile and cover the beds with mulch. With the exception of scale, this is largely what Jay and I did on one of the last nice weekends of the autumn. We cleaned out our community garden bed, and at home, harvested all our herbs, ripped out the annual flowers, chopped down the perennial vegetation such as lilly, iris and hosta leaves. The leaves and stems of the very prolific wave petunias would have overwhelmed even my ambitious home composting system, so we had to take them to the county compost site. The farm equivalent would have been to drive the tractor to a field and left them to compost on their own.

Wave petunias mid-season.
They grew much wavier and wildly colorful by late summer.

All that remains is the dusty miller and leaf mulch to protect the soil

Leaves
During my 13 years on the farm, five years of college and 10 years of renting, "raking leaves" meant nothing to me. They blew around the yard, off into the fields and effectively disappeared. Then I bought a house, and then I moved to Jay's house, both of which had enough tree action that the leaves couldn't be ignored.

Composting leaves seems like a good idea, but they are voluminous. Last year my neighbor Randy told me that he was done raking and he was just going to mow over the leaves where they lay. "Good for the soil and good for my back," he told me. We took it a step further. We gathered all the leaves on our front sidewalk and mowed over them, back and forth, until they were leaflets. This year we got smarter and simply gathered leaves in the back yard and ground them up on the dirt. We filled two plastic garbage cans and spread the rest on the flower beds to protect the soil over the winter. The leaves in the bins will be our compost "brown" to match whatever "green" we add to our compost bins from the kitchen.

Our autumn compost bin prep includes two plastic garbage cans with tight lids full of  shredded leaves.  As "green" garden waste is dumped into the wire bin on the left, we'll add an equal amount of leaf material to keep the green/brown mixture roughly even. The wire bin at right is the summer's yard and kitchen waste newly chopped up under our mower and mixed with new leaves and dirt. It will be nicely composted by next spring.

Sticks
Trees don't just drop leaves, they drop sticks. Lots of them. I don't remember picking up sticks on the farm, but I seem to have to bend over like a duck pecking at the grass every time we mow. We store them next to the house and a couple times a year put them out on the curb. We do this in the autumn at great peril of it snowing before the city lawn and garden department comes through our neighborhood.

Sticks waiting to be picked up - before the first snow PLEASE!

Winterize

On the farm, we worked hard to winterize the house and buildings with animals. This meant staging plenty of hay for feeding and straw for bedding. In the early days, it meant putting hay bales around the exterior of the house to stop wind from blowing through the foundation. We also put away tools and machinery and moved animals to winter quarters.

In the city, we put our lawn furniture under a tarp. Not terribly romantic :) How do YOU prepare, both physically and mentally, for winter?