VISA and HOBA

On July 28th HandsOn Bay Area brought a great group of Volunteers from VISA to the Haven Garden to build us some raised beds. My wish was for four beds and I was told they would be building two. Hey I will take what I can get. When I arrived at the garden I looked at the stack of wood and thought to myself that's a lot of wood for two beds. What a great surprise to find out I was getting my wish!

The volunteers were a group of college interns that had come from all over the US to intern at VISA for the summer. After all the formalities we broke up into teams and got to work, and work we did! Well I mostly supervised and did some training on how to harvest bush bean. 

Team 1 was all about moving soil from the parking lot into the garden. Those guys had it going on with their assembly line approach. Two on wheel barrels and four shoveling.

Team 2 had the tough job of building the beds....

One down three to go. 

Adding hardware cloth to the bottom of the beds.

Team 3: While the beds were being built I had a team helping me to harvest and clean out the beds.

Picking Bush Beans

Cleaning out the Strawberry bed.

Working in the orchard

Thinning out the apples.

Now it's time to get the site ready for the new beds. Lots of leveling to do.....

The first bed is in. We put newspaper under the beds as well as in the beds to keep the weeds at bay.

The final step...adding soil to the beds....

Thank you VISA you did an awesome job!

Can't wait for the next project...
adding water lines and trellises to the beds

VISA Update

I know you are all waiting to see the photos of the raised beds VISA built for us. I'm waiting to get permission to use the photos I took of the event and of their team. What I will tell you is they did an amazing job along with HandsOn Bay Area who brought Haven and VISA together and for supervising the project. Be sure to check out HOBA's website. They do great work in the Bay Area.

 HandsOn Bay Area

Other projects I have in the planning stages:

New raised beds

• Adding water lines
• Building trellises
• Installing PVC frame for row covers
• Adding wood chips around beds

 Garden projects in the planning stage for 2010/2011

• Walking path through the garden
• Flower garden along the walking path
• Planting grapevines and installing supports for vines

Dang! I'm going to be busy!