Hello relatives! I hope last weekend was restorative, both because time with family and friends is nourishing, and because we have work to do. The gardens are really beginning to move. We have more to plant (and weed), we need to label what we have, and we need to make some decisions about the space that remains. This does push trellis construction back a week, but don't worry- we have that space at this moment.
We'll begin this Saturday in the garden at 9 am. Rain is predicted both Thursday and Friday, so anticipate getting MUDDY. Long pants, closed toe shoes, and you may even want a long sleeve for the first hour- it almost always feels colder after a rain. We'll start with noticing and celebrating that which is going right, and then we'll make some decisions to help move things that are maybe not working out quite as well as we'd hoped in to a direction that we, the gardeners, like better.
A side note to decode a term you may have heard being tossed about: Often, we are talking about the Turtle clan's quadrant of our garden, you are hearing us reference last year's milpa trial, but I don't know that we've explained that very well. Milpa is a Náhuatl word, Nahuatl being an indigenous trade language spoken by a wide number of peoples in central America, notably both the Aztecs and the Maya, of whom there are many in Nebraska now. Milpa actually means something more like "that which is sown in the field" or "the things we planted", but today the term milpa is a reference less to the specific crops and more to the planting technique / technology (know how) that allows (encourages!) the various plants to all grow together in a somewhat chaotic mini-ecology.
Here's a Nebraska look at milpa gardening with Graham Christiansen of GCResolve (an environmentally oriented farmer education organization) and Luis Marcos of Pixan Ixim, the Mayan Community Center in Omaha. There's a link in here for free milpa seeds (in the future- if you want these now, I have them) https://youtu.be/zBDqQzqbyww?si=Gmm_VKBaCOsvYmkW
And here's another look at a milpa project at one of the Wasatch Community Garden in Salt Lake City (Wasatch there is somewhat like Community Crops here): https://youtu.be/PEY8omjVlD8?si=1SwMOD6qjWs3uw_b
See you Saturday, Molly