Category Archives: Gardening

Dirt2Table: Building a Greenhouse: Growing a Community

It’s a Wrap!

Here is a list of the final figures from Fairpark Community’s First Annual Plant Sale:

4500 total plants
28 varieties of Heirloom tomatoes, 16 varieties of Peppers, 3 varieties of Eggplant, and 3 varieties of herbs
160 unique pre-orders resulting in 2,373 plants pre-ordered
Hot plants (that is, the first to sell out) included:

Tomatoes:Beefsteak, Black Brandywine, Black Krim, Burbank, Hillbilly, Martino’s Roma, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Sugary Cherry,

Sungold Cherry, and Tiny Tim

Peppers: California Wonder, Gypsy Hybrid, Jalapeno, Poblano, Purple Beauty, and Rainbow Bell Mix

Eggplants: Black Beauty and Mixed Fingers

2,127 plants on Event day for sale

1,977 plants sold, 150 donated to a non-profit organization (there is no accurate count of consumers attending the event day

sale).

Hundreds of seeds given away on plant sale day.
Approximately 500 volunteer hours on the project
$8,053 donations: $1,500 Salt Lake City Signature Event Fund Grant$6,553 in kind

This is what happens when a community comes together for to build something good. And this project was good. It was phenomenal. It got vegetables growing in the backyards of Fairpark Community Residents. People who never grew vegetables in their lives are now growing their own food. And proud of it.

Remember to submit your photos of your gardening adventures to dirt2tableslc.org to post in our Flickr album: https://flic.kr/s/aHskyUjQk3

Please also share your stories, your recipes using your fresh vegetables and other anecdotes. We want to hear from you!

We are also building a list of potential volunteers for next year’s event. Please write to dirt2tableslc.org if you’d like to participate.

Stellar Success for 1st Annual Plant Sale!

Be proud Fairpark Community residents! The 1st Annual Fairpark Community Plant Sale was a big success. We achieved our aim of sending over 4000 healthy vegetable plants home to happy gardens both within our neighborhood and beyond.

After growing and selling the 28 varieties of Heirloom tomatoes, 16 kinds of Peppers, 3 Eggplant, and herbs we recovered the costs for growing the plants and we were also able to give away hundreds of packages of FREE Seeds, as well as pots, soil and seeds for the younger ones to take home and watch grow. Everyone had a really fun time, especially those that spent the whole day volunteering for the big event. From the end of February until May 14 over 400 volunteer hours into the growing and operating the event.

This event would not have been so wonderful without the dedicated hard work of volunteers. No amount of gratitude is sufficient to express how thankful we all are that these volunteers were able to give so much of their time.

We also couldn’t have done it without a few other pieces of unusually good luck. Two of these lucky breaks stand out. First to happen was getting the majority of the Greenhouse building materials donated. But by far the most important lucky break was being allowed to put the Greenhouse right at the wonderful Vegan Vietnamese restaurant, All Chay. We can’t heap enough praise on the kind and generous owners of that restaurant. Not only did they allow us to assemble the Greenhouse right against their front window, but they provided many hours of volunteer help with the project, from its assembly, to tending the plants and making sure the windows were always clean for the plants and for patrons to view the plants from the outside.

Fairpark also got some media coverage out of this project: KRCL, KUER and Salt Lake City Television.

For you patrons that supported our community by getting plants and planting them in our garden, please send photos of your garden and/or any gardening activities to dirt2table@gmail.com or text to 801-403-0121. Please add your general location (e.g., Fairpark) and your first name and any comment you’d like to add. We want to see your gardens and post them to our social media!

We are already planning for next year. Stay tuned for a re-branding and details about the 2017 event.

Garden on!

Get your Garden on with Fairpark Community’s First Annual Plant Sale!

Got Garden?

We have just what you need to fill it up!

After months of hard work by volunteers, the Fairpark Community Council’s First Annual Plant Sale is almost here! Almost 4,000 veggies and herb plants are being cared for by dedicated volunteers. The seedlings are growing like wild and will be sure to enhance any garden in our neighborhood with culinary delights.

Read more here (http://fairparkcommunity.org/?p=814) about how to pre-order your plants and pick them up as early as the end of April, and view full catalogs of the availalbe varieties of vegetables and herbs, as well as a full color listing of the vegetable seeds that will be given away at the May 14 event.

How did this all start?

The FCC Board decided to take advantage of the Salt Lake City annual Signature Event Fund application in fall of 2015. The FCC Board decided that a fun event would be a plant sale and education event. The scope of events that happened after that was amazing!

A donation of a structure that looks very much like a bus shelter was timely. Volunteers dismantled the structure over a weekend in late February and the following weekend rebuilt it at All Chay restaurant (1264 W 500 N), the proprietors of which graciously donated space for the project. The next 6 weeks were busy with fine tuning the structure with materials to make it a functioning greenhouse, planting seeds, separating seedlings, watering the plants and generating interest in our community for the project. Tom King, project lead, appeared on KRCL Radio’s Punk Rock Farmer show on April 15 to discuss and promote the project.

The next few weeks will be spent continuing the care of the plants, advertising and promoting the event, taking pre-orders with the culminating plant sale event at Northwest Community Center, Saturday, May 14 at 10am.

As a special incentive to get people to attend the May 14 event, we will be offering free seeds for lettuce, carrots, zucchini, cucumbers and more! There will fun be activities for kids of all ages.

View the full color listing of the vegetable seeds that will be given away here.

Left over plants from the May 14 event will be taken to the Get Into the River Festival from 5-7pm, at the Fairpark Amphitheater, 155 North 1000 West.

We are very excited about this community building/enhancing project. We hope residents will become more interested in growing their own food, sharing their stories about gardening, sharing samples of their edibles, and develop sustainable habits that will improve health and lifestyles for years to come.

Garden on dude!

Start Your Garden Catalog!

The long awaited Dirt2Table Start Your Garden Plant Sale Catalog is finally here! View the catalog and follow instructions for accessing the pre-order form.

Plants are $1 each, or $5 for a six pack or $25 for 6-six packs. Mix and match is ok!
(all proceeds will be used to enhance the next Annual Fairpark Community Plant Sale).
Fill out your pre-order form and submit it via any of these methods:

at the All Chay Restaurant, 1264 West 500 North
Scan and email to
dirt2tableslc@gmail.com
Text photo of order form to
8015021991

Order pick ups will be arranged using the contact info you provide on the order form. We anticipate starting to have orders picked up on May 6 th or 7th
in advance of the May 14 th event in the park.

For status on your order you can call Tom at 801-502-1991.

*** Attention! Quantities are limited! All orders will be filled on a first come first serve basis. Please get your order form to one of our partners as soon as possible to try to ensure your order can be complete. Payment will be at time of pickup, in case substitutions or subtractions apply***

To view the full catalog, click garden catalog.

To print an order form, click plant order form.

To print a flyer, click flyer.

New! (April 19, 2016): Seed Giveaway Listing for anyone who attends the event on May 14 – even if you have pre-ordered and picked up your order! Click here for the listing.

Click the thumbnail images below to view one catalog page at a time.

Pages 1 and 2

Pages 3 and 4

Seed Giveaway Listing image

Dirt2Table: A Great time of year!

Don’t you love it this time of year? I certainly do. Everything from the buds swelling on the fruit trees, dandelions blooming, willows and others flowering, to the birds getting more active, it sure feels like spring.

I just hope that a late frost doesn’t get some of our fruit trees this year. As you may know if you read these columns, the Fairpark Community Council is hosting it’s First Annual Get your garden STARTED Plant Sale. We are starting dozens of varieties of peppers and tomatoes. Lots of heirlooms as well as several varieties of Basil. In fact, as of March 7th some of the Lettuce Leaf basil is already up from seeds planted 8 days ago.

Continue reading →

Dirt2Table: Save the Date – Fairpark Community’s First Start Your Garden Plant Sale!

Announcing ¡Viva los Vegetales por Comida!

The Fabulous First Annual Fairpark Community Start Your Garden Plant Sale, May 14, 2016

That’s right, this year will mark the first in a long succession of annual plant sales that will help enrich and grow our community with the shared experience of successful gardening. The plan is to make it both easier and more fun for folks who are already growing some of their own food as well as to encourage and support those of our neighbors that aren’t yet growing delicious food right in their own yards.

Details about the event and how volunteers can help will be available in a future Gazette and on the Fairpark Community website.

Join the event at our Facebook page
This event is made possible through a grant from Salt Lake City’s Signature Event Fund, which provides funding to support community events in Salt Lake City.

Dirt2Table: Too Many Apples?

Now is the time to preserve apples. There are literally tons of apples ripening on trees here in the Fairpark Community. These apples might be in your yard, your neighbor’s yard or maybe even in a public park. Apples are great to eat fresh, and they will keep for quite a while in the fridge or a cold room. They are also great for making apple butter, applesauce or apple jelly.

One of my favorite things to do with a lot of the apples that I get this time of year is to make dried apples.

You need to get the apples into somewhat uniform thin slices. They can be up to 1⁄4 inch thick, but a little less than that is better. This can be done with one of the hand crank machines that peel, core and slice the apple. They aren’t too expensive and can sometimes be found in good shape at a thrift store. The slices they make are actually a long spiral that can be separated into the pieces you lay on your dehydrator screen. You can also cut, peel and core your apples with a paring knife,and make thin slices that way.

Once you have your slices, just arrange them on the trays of your food dehydrator, and in 5 to 10 days you will have delicious dried apples ready to store for the winter. That is if you don’t eat them all up! They are so good that it is easy to eat a lot of them. Kids love them and they make good gifts in small jars. Try sending some to school with the kids for lunch or snacks.

Dirt2Table: Fall Planting and Fruit Leather

Things can be very busy for the gardener during August. What with keeping up with the zucchini and canning the tomatoes it is sometimes hard to find time to make a fall planting of fast maturing and cool weather crops. But you will be glad if you do. What I planted a few weeks ago includes Spinach, Lettuce, Cilantro, and Carrots. I didn’t plant any peas, but there still might be time for all of these types of cool weather crops. The last two fall seasons stayed frost free until at least mid October here in Salt Lake City, so it might happen again this fall.

Besides fall plantings I wanted to mention Fruit Leather. While being a little overwhelmed by all the peaches off of one tree and making Jam, I decided to try making fruit leather. I simply pureed the peeled cut peaches and then slowly cooked them to thicken the puree. Then I added honey to make it extra sweet. Finally I poured the jam like peach puree onto parchment paper covered dehydrator screens and put into the dehydrator. If you don’t have a dehydrator then put the parchment onto baking dishes and bake at 200 F. overnight.

For more information on fall planting, see the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s Fall Planting Guide or Mother Earth News.

Happy growing and eating!

Dirt2Table: When the Cure is Worse than the Disease

Don’t make the cure worse than the disease when dealing with pests in the garden. There are a variety of ways to keep pests from totally destroying our gardens without having to apply poisons that will harm ourselves and our natural friends the predatory and pollinating insects.

The first thing that one should do is become more tolerant. Learn to tolerate some level of damage to our plants and produce. If we do this, we find that we aren’t so eager to reach for the chemical warfare agents at the first sign of aphids or snails. Combine this more tolerant attitude with regular monitoring of your plants to see if they are being attacked by anything. Quite often our vegetable plants will not be bothered by pests. If they are being eaten by something, try to determine what is eating them before taking any steps to protect them. Tomatoes aren’t usually bothered by pests, except for the tomato horn worm, and while these can do a lot of damage in a short period of time, it is usually only one or two of them at a time and they are pretty easy to locate and destroy by hand. Each of the so called cut-worms is about as big as an adult man’s index finger, and though they are green they are pretty easy to spot, catch and smash.

Earwigs and snails are two other types of pests that can do some damage to our vegetable plants.

Snails are the biggest threat as plants are just emerging from the ground. For the last five years or so every time I plant a hill of cucumbers, squash or melons I cover the hill with a little cage I made out of ¼ inch hardware cloth. That is like window screen but with bigger holes. The cages are about 6-8 inches tall and about 8-10 inches in diamater. They can be used year of after year to keep your little seedlings safe from snails until they are big enough to survive without protection. You can also put out a bowl with a little beer or sugar water for the snails to drown in. Putting the rinds from halved cantaloupes with the open side down where snails are a problem will cause snails to gather inside, making it easy to dispose of them.

Earwigs can cause significant damage to some crops. One non toxic way to keep them under control is to put soup cans with about an inch of cooking oil in the bottom so that the earwigs can crawl in and be trapped. I have had a small soup can get half full with earwigs within two months.

For more information regarding pesticides and alternatives, visit: http://www.beyondpesticides.org/

Dirt2Table: Simple Practices to Enhance Plant Growth

At last! The growing season is here! Although we had an extra early start for cold hardy crops like lettuce, spinach, peas, carrots, onions and more, the safe time to put out tender annuals like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash and cucumbers started about the first of May for most of us here in Fairpark Community.

I wanted to focus on a simple practice that increases the size and yield of some of our garden plants. If you are a gardener in this area you probably grow a lot of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. These three types of plants, which each have an enormous range of varieties, along with a lots of other agricultural plants including potato and tobacco, are all in the large plant family of Solanaceae or the Nightshade family. The practice that helps speed growth and increase yields consists of removing the side branches that form above each leaf. Not on the whole plant or all season long, but during the first month to six weeks it is a good idea to remove any branches from the stem as they form.

For tomato plants, it helps to keep the plant branch free for the first 18 to 24 inches of stem, and allow the plant to keep the branches above that. For peppers it is 6 to 18 inches depending on the variety. For eggplant keeping the plant branch free to a height of 12 to 18 inches seems about right. Continue reading →