Growing Challenge Month 3
Just in time for the winter solstice, our little Monthly Challenge Patch celebrates its third birthday (3 months, that is). This month has had the perfect mix of soaking rain and long sunny days and the patch is looking better than ever. Fortunate weather aside, we have also been very regular about harvesting, which has further bolstered production of young, sweet, leafy greens.
Parsley has been the big hero this month. We planted it as a long-term investment, knowing that fresh herbs are both extremely costly and easy to grow. What a great investment it proved to be! IGA charges $3.00/16g, so it is difficult to look at our prolific parsley without seeing dollar signs.
The mint on the other hand, has had yet another disappointing month. We initially planted it as a mature plant thinking that we could get some short-term gains before it could take over the whole patch. How wrong we were. Instead of behaving like the weed that it is, our mint has languished with sickly yellow leaves while the rest of the patch excelled. Just to prove conventional knowledge wrong, we suspect that it isn't coping with all of the water. It goes to show, thinking short-term doesn't pay-off.
Our monthly ritual continued and was further bolstered by the spontaneous growth of mustard greens and bok choy. Pop Up Patch regularly hosts school groups and we suspect that children may be responsible for some extra planting in not only our challenge patch, but many of our members' as well. We'll take all of the help that we can get.
We checked and then re-checked our work. Crossed all of the T's and dotted the I's. Just got the results back from the laboratory. Our little patch has produced a whopping $42.65.
Looking forward, we will try to change our watering habits to hopefully rehabilitate our pathetic mint and hope that July will be as good to the rest of the plants as June has been.
Happy solstice! Happy super moon! Happy gardening everyone!
Music courtesy of Roud Lee:
http://roudlee.bandcamp.com/