Garden Details
Garden Details
The garden has 20 raised beds for vegetables including the following: tomatoes, beans, peppers, egg plant, lettuce, radishes, onions, squash, cucumbers and various herbs. It also includes 12 beds of zinnias for pollinators. This year we added four sweet potato towers and eight potato towers. We are currently also adding a hoop house that is partially constructed. Besides this, we have three Johnson Su bioreactors for composting. The garden is on our property (Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica), but is community planned and maintained by volunteers, which include three sisters. We work with Live Well Atchison since the produce goes to the local Catholic Charities
Garden Practices
Garden Practices
We use locally sourced fertilizer and save flower seeds for the next year. Seeds were also donated by seed companies and local stores. We also were donated several hoses. We hope to eventually use the bioreactors for fertilizer for the garden also.
Volunteers sign up to water and check produce, and we have work days for planting and harvesting. We plan to use the hoop house for almost year long production of vegetables when it is finished.
beans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, parsley, basil, mint, lettuce, radishes, potatoes, sweet potatoes
marigolds, cannas, zinnias,
The produce is given to Catholic Charities. We have several regular volunteers and have college, high school and elementary students help with larger projects. The volunteers plant, harvest vegetables, and water. They have also worked on building the beds and constructing the hoop house.
Additional Information
Additional Information
Sometimes we do not get enough volunteers. The Japanese beetles and squash bugs decimated some of our crops or at least cut down the produce.
We need to buy plastic to cover our hoop house and could use more soaking hoses for the garden and hoop house.
This year's sweet potatoes produced an abundance of potatoes for Catholic Charities. Overall, we probably contributed over
1000 pounds of food to the local Catholic Charities. We successfully constructed three Johnson Su bioreactors for compost.
The garden this year was actually quite beautiful. We had two trellises of green beans and lots of zinnias and marigolds which attracted pollinators.
