Community Garden

(I got behind on my blogging so I did a lot of catching up today)

A few weeks ago, during probably the hottest week of the summer (I know July in IA is hot, but seriously July 18-22 were awful), I (with my little brother and sister) signed up to help with our church's community garden. It seemed simple - we just needed to water, weed, and harvest as needed. It was fun, but I realized that I don't know that much about gardening (Like basically nothing about growing veggies or when they can be harvested or identifying a few things). I even had some problems identifying weeds...

But it ended up to be a fun week. We had to go water a lot because it was so hot, but that was fun and we tried to weed a bit before we got too hot. The best part of the week was definitely harvesting. My little brother loved looking through all the plants to find veggies. We harvested a zucchini (which I ended up cooking), a few tomatoes, and a few onions. The volunteers usually take the harvests to a local food bank, but since we didn't have much we brought it home (which is also allowed). The idea of the garden is a really neat one - various volunteers from the church take care of the garden and the produce is distributed to local food pantries as well as community members.

Even though I learned that I was not a very knowledgeable gardener, it was still a fun week and I definitely felt that I was making a good contribution to the community garden. (I think my siblings enjoyed it too!) I may sign up for another week, but I might have to do a little more research first.