We are less than 48 hours away from planting our vegetable gardens at Carpenter Place, and we’re really excited!
Last month, we won a $1,000 grant from Kalso Earth Shoes to fund an Earth Day project. We chose to outfit a local organization with fruit and vegetable gardens.
A garden center that has been in the Wichita community since the 1920s stepped up and has been a tremendous help. Johnson’s Garden Center has provided a 20% discount on our purchases, as well as made their incredible staff available to us to answer 101 questions. They’re even delivering everything to Carpenter Place for us completely free. We got pretty lucky with those guys.
I was there on Wednesday this week picking up seed potatoes and a few vegetable seeds, as well as making a game plan with Marty, one of the owners. Yesterday, I chopped the seed potatoes, per their careful instructions, so that they are ready for planting on Sunday morning. We’ll be planting Yukon Gold and red skin potatoes for the Carpenter Place girls.
For seeds, we purchased carrots, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, green beans, cantaloupe, watermelon, beets, and peas.
This morning, I went out to Johnson’s to organize my order of vegetable plants, which will put our girls a few weeks closer to eating their freshly picked produce. We spent almost $300 and got strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, as well as eggplant, three colors of bell peppers, two kinds of hot peppers, okra, two kinds of tomatoes, and snap peas.
We’re also setting them up with fresh herbs. We’ll be planting oregano, rosemary, basil, and cilantro in pots. All of those seed packs were purchased earlier this week.
We still have a long shopping list, as we need to get the raised bed kits, water hoses, chicken wire to prevent moles, and a few other odds and ends. As well, we need to get a healthy lunch ordered so we can fuel our big team of volunteers headed our way on Sunday morning!
As of now, Sunday is supposed to be sunny, with a high of 72 degrees and zero chance of rain. Sounds like perfect Earth Day and garden planting weather to us!
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