Our first mini workshop on Saturday was great!  We had a good group turn up to talk about planting fruit trees and we got some pears and persimmons into the ground.

If you missed out, don’t worry, we have more workshops coming up.  Mini workshops are on Saturday mornings from about 9:30-10, with a chance for hands on experience for those who want to stick around.

Our upcoming topics are:

Sat. April 6 – How to plant tomatoes; how to prepare the bed, selecting varieties, different methods of staking/caging, dealing with pests and diseases. A free tomato seedling to first ten participants. Additional seedlings will be for sale.
Sat. April 13 – OU Big Event volunteer day (No workshop)
Sat. April 20 – Flowers for Bouquets: what to plant to keep your vases filled all summer long. (Followed by our Earth Day celebration.)
Sat. April 27 – Composting with worms

Mini workshops are held at our Olie Avenue lot, one block east of Western between NW 32nd and Hill Streets.

For more information, or requests for future workshop topics, you can contact us at 405-524-1864 or info@commonwealthurbanfarms.com.

No!  We sure don’t!

Our volunteers have been out in the bad weather and the good getting ready for the spring.  Besides doing a lot of maintenance, cleaning and organizing – we have rows of garlic and other cold weather veggies growing and our composting is going strong.

A few weeks ago some of our volunteers learned about making soil blocks to start some of our seeds in.  No more need for all those disposable plastic trays!  This makes our budget and the environment a little bit happier.

A fantastic team of youth volunteers dug in and turned over our newest lot, all by shovel, sweat and muscle.  We’re very impressed, and extremely grateful!  Now this space is ready for our newest exciting project – bioremediation.  We’ll be using mushrooms to reduce the soil’s lead content so that’s we can be sure it’s 100% safe for growing food.  Is your interest piqued?  I hope so!  More to come on that in the next month or two – or better yet, to learn more, come get involved!  We look forward to seeing you!

The carrots have germinated! You can see the tiny green seedlings, reaching their leaves up out of the soil. These were the first  food-crop seeds we have planted, which made October 21 a quietly momentous day for CommonWealth Urban Farms. The carrot seeds will germinate and grow this fall, then grow more slowly over the short days of winter, and be ready for harvest in the spring. Cold weather changes the starches in carrots into sugars, so winter grown carrots are the sweetest. We watered daily; carrot seed is very picky about drying out and won’t germinate well unless it’s kept moist for the two week germination period. Because they are so slow, it is especially exciting when we finally see the little seedlings appearing out of the ground.

With the help of 25+ volunteers we are making progress on the preparation of garden beds and other planting areas.  David Braden has done an excellent job overseeing the design and creation of the garden beds.

The pictures below provide an idea of how things are going, although more beds have been created since these pictures were taken.

We’ve also moved right along in planting vegetables for the Spring CSA harvest.  So far we have planted carrots, garlic, onions and shallots.  We hope to put more plants in the ground that will over-winter in the garden within the next few weeks.

We have also begun ground preparation for the backyard lot adjacent to the central lot.  We hope to plant cover crops at the next CommonWork event.

If you’re looking for a way to be involved, join us every Saturday at CommonWork from 8am-11am at the central lot.  For directions send an email to info@commonwealthurbanfarms.com.

CommonWork today was very satisfying work.

After we had processed 7 barrels of beer grains, done some work in the garden and worked on a time line for when we would need the compost ready, we went back to the compost piles with Lia and began turning the piles for the first time. We wanted to check on the progress of the piles because we’re wanting to start planting our first crops the first two weeks of October. Turns out the piles are composting, but not at the rate we had hoped, so we worked on turning and watering a section of the pile. This should greatly increase the rate of decomposition.

We all felt very satisfied after digging through and turning the piles for 45 minutes. There’s something about turning the compost, witnessing the progress, and instigating further progress that is a different quality of work than say digging in the soil to weed.

Come out and experience the joys of composting (or other garden preparation) with us every Sat. from 8-11am.