During this chilly month of February, we’re reestablishing garden rows in our learning garden. Garden rows help to evenly distribute water, keep your garden tidy, and provide you with easy access to each plant. Rows also allow you to evenly space seeds to ensure that each plant has ample room to grow. Our amazing team of Sanctuary One volunteers have been working extremely hard establishing new rows in the learning garden for our Spring vegetable crop. Check out the SFGate article, “How to dig rows for gardening” to see the method we used to build our beautiful rows.
Spring is on its way and the Sanctuary One garden is really beginning to take shape! Our powerhouse team of garden volunteers added hay to the garden rows to help to amend the soil and suppress some of the weeds. Sanctuary One would also like to give a big shout out to the amazing folks at Rogue Compost for their generous donation of 10 yards of fine, food safe compost that we’ll use this month to amend our new garden rows. Our ranch hand Jerry worked incredibly hard to transport and unload the huge and fantastic gift to the farm. This donation will help to support our mission in bringing people, animals and the earth closer together as we grow nutritious food to donate to Access Food Bank and also to share with the volunteers and animals on the farm.
Finished compost makes the most natural fertilizer! At Sanctuary One we use it to amend the soil and avoid using products like feather meal and blood meal which are often the byproduct of slaughterhouses. We made great use of the amazing compost donation from Rogue Compost by adding 3 inches of the magical “garden gold” to each of our rows. John and Jared are two of our green thumbed volunteers who worked extremely hard this week to create an additional 10 new 25 ft rows to the learning garden. They also amended the new plot with hay and finished compost!
And while there’s frost and ice all around the farm, Sanctuary One seeds are starting to sprout! Our kale starts are safe indoors to avoid the late winter freeze. It takes the full team to ensure our seeds are successful. Operation Manager, Brian and Animal Care Manager, Melissa stepped up recently and were mindful of the seeds when temperatures dropped and our garden guru, Jamie had the day off. Brian and Melissa moved them inside and even protected them from Rio the house cat who attempted to walk through the sprouts. Silly Rio. We think he’s a little upset that we took the seed packets away from him recently. Through our partnership with ACCESS we received many packets of seeds that will hopefully grow into a nice healthy crop of fresh produce we’ll be donating back to ACCESS food banks later this year.
The Sanctuary One staff make an amazing team because even though they’re all very busy completing assigned duties they still make time to nurture each part of the Sanctuary One mission, in this case, caring for the earth by caring for our seeds.
