Celebration of all Things Tomato

This is the time of year to revel in the tomatoes. The last hanging-on days before the first frost brings it all to an end. The colors, flavors, shapes and sizes seem endless.

In SE Como, the annual Tomato Tastin' Experience exploits the annual tomato bounty. Here, attendees of the Como Cookout get a chance to taste dozens of different tomato varieties side-by-side and then vote for their favorites. This year's Como Cookout is on September 20th from 2-5pm at Van Cleve Park.

Winning results from the past years' tastings are found on the Como Green Village website. It is a handy list for future seed ordering.

Recently, I discovered this new book that profiles hundreds of tomatoes and provides beautiful images too. Check out The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World's Most Beautiful Fruit by By Amy Goldman, Victor Schrager.

What a great idea! The Midway Barter Market

In the Hamline Midway neighborhood, neighbors long for a local co-op grocery store. While the community waits to have a walkable venue for locally grown food, they have come to their own devices; setting up a dropsite for Whole Farm and creating the Midway Barter Market.

Whole Farm Co-op is a network of 30+ farms near the Twin Cities. By getting together to do orders, marketing, and delivery, they are able to be small producers who really know & care about what they offer us as consumers. Customers order online; products include meats, dairy, groceries, crafts, garden produce in the summer, and more. Midway deliveries will be monthly on the 3rd Wednesdays at the drop site at Hamline/Thomas SuperUSA. This means ordering at www.wholefarmcoop.com by the second Wednesday.

At the Midway Barter Market, neighbors exchange handmade goods, garden grown produce, softly used items and plants without the use of money! All sorts of items have been exchanged and its a fun time! There are even the occasional garden and henhouse tour, or impromptu juggling lessons in a kid friendly space. Come on down on Sunday to hang out with your neighbors and swap your goods and have a great time! The Midway Barter Market is now on Sundays 1-3 pm on the boulevard at the Anderson Oaks place, 1724 Englewood Ave until the season ends. See photos of the market here.

These great options have been brought to fruition by community members who participate in the Hamline Midway Environment Group, Mighty Midway Greening and Growing, LISN (Leasdership in Support on Neighborhoods) and specifically due to the efforts of Nine Dodge.

August is National Community Garden Awareness Month and 4th Annual Parade of Community Gardens

The 4th Annual Parade of Community Gardens!!
August 22nd - 10:00am to 2:00pm

There is a great group of community gardens participating this year on the Parade, all are bringing attention to & celebrating in these vital greenspaces in our communities! Forty community gardens from across the Twin Cities & greater Minnesota open their gardens to the public. Experience the unique and individual gardening efforts happening around the state. Gardens will feature a variety of attractions including music, cool treats, a goat, heirloom tomato festival, a beehive and more! Here are a couple profiles:

• At the Accord Community Garden in SE Como Minneapolis, visitors will find viola music, birthday cake and ice cream along with beautiful native plants under a one-of-a-kind sculpture.

• At the Midway Greenspirit Garden in the Midway, the feature will be the bees! Community beekeepers will be on hand to describe the symbiosis of having a hive in a community garden and what it entails.

The event is a free & self-guided tour, rain or shine. Details and brochure maps, in English & English/Spanish, can be found at www.gardeningmatters.org or call Gardening Matters at 612-492-8964.

Find more information on National Community Garden Awareness Month at OBSNews.com.

Worm Bin Washout

I have been trying to get the last worm bin task for weeks now. In fact, others want worms and are waiting on me. The bin was now too heavy to tote in and out every time I think of digging in, so it sat in the backyard waiting until I could harvest the last of the worm castings. Then the big rain came. I had thought of this scenario, and while my bin's lid has some small holes in the lid for ventilation, the tarp I kept over the works should keep the rain out. Well, not so. When I opened up to finish the belated harvest with my daughter's help, the worms were in the top of the bedding trying to find some air with puddles encroaching all around. The whole bin was sogged out, the bedding had the consistency of a too-thick brownie batter.

What to do? The bottom-side spigot was already open. The bin's bedding had so much water holding capacity that tipping to pour off water only dislodge the whole mess. The bin contained too much dense mass to even consider that evaporation could dry it out.

I needed to add something that would absorb excess moisture. Since we augment our gas furnace with a wood pellet stove, the pellets themselves jumped into mind. These pressured bits of sawdust are handy when cleaning spills and turns out they can sop up a soggy worm bin too. I added them slowly and carefully incorporating as I went. Laverme's Worms warns of using sawdust in vermicomposting because they can dry out the bedding too much. In the end, the pellets turned out to be a save and my original bin is now three.

The Natives Are Restless

Here is a new favorite for my "blue" garden- Spotted Bee Balm, or Monarda punctata L. Thanks to Hannah from the Friends of Horton Park for suggesting this wacky-yet-beautiful native for the sandy soil here. As I was checking it out today, I saw a number of different wasps and bees doing their thing. It reminded me of my Leadplant earlier in the season. I saw 4 or 5 different types of bees on that native plant at one time (they move fast, so its a bit hard to count). The pollinator sightings would please the Horton Park community gardeners, many whom have taken a course on native pollinators this season.

My winged visitors highlight an important reason to plant natives in your landscapes- to provide food sources for our native insects. As we use more and more cultivars (like the petunias on the left of the monarda) the options for native pollinators become slim which impacts the foodweb that relies on those insects. The diversity of insects can also be on your side when it comes to bad bugs.

Just last night, as I was with a group of community gardeners in SE Como brainstorming ideas for a rain garden at Como Corner Community Garden (a project sponsored by SECIA and Mississippi Watershed Management Organization) and one of the gardeners had a book in hand by Douglas W. Tallamy called "Bringing nature home". As we envisioned raingardens, cisterns, dry creek beds, the group also insisted upon native plants and "ugly bugs". The word is spreading about the important role these insects have in the greenspaces of our cities and suburbs. Something the Horton Park community gardeners would cheer on.

Hanging it all out

This time of year means gardens galore, so to change it up, here is a non-gardening post-Clotheslines!

I admit it, I really enjoy hanging laundry. Enough that it causes me pause before passing the task onto my kids. Hanging clothes on the line is a calm, repetitive, hypnotic task which cools me down on a hot day. I can ponder, watch birds or just enjoy the process of getting our clothes up in the sun to dry at no carbon cost. We run about 1 load of clothes per day, and from April to October, we use our line as the primary clothes drier. I feel a bit for allergic households who cannot use a clothesline because their clothes bring in allergens. Automatic clothes driers are a typical household's second biggest energy using appliance (behind refrigerators). Air drying is free in both dollars and on carbon footprints.

In SE Como Minneapolis, the neighborhood association SECIA, raised awareness of energy consumption of driers by distributing free clotheslines to residents in 2007. It was a very popular program sponsored by the City of Minneapolis climate Change micro grants and really could be repeated every year with the high resident turnover due to proximity to the U of MN. The neighborhood association distributed mini retractable clotheslines to 78 residents.

Numbers cited for energy conservation due to clothesline use include a 3.3% reduction of CO2 if everyone used a line for half a year, and 5.8% of a household's energy demands can be due to an electric clothes drier.

Midway Community Greening and Gardening gets busy

The Midway is bursting with community greening and gardening events this weekend. Time to enjoy the spoils of summer, join any or all!

These events are reflected on the Hamline Midway Community Gardening Calendar (see the events box on the right sidebar).

• Horton Park Community Garden time Sun, July 12, 12:00pm – 2:30pm. We may do a bit of watering, continue the pursuit of identifying grasses, lookover the beauties such as butterfly weed and its usual monarch caterpillars (see photo). Group info is here at the community garden's googlegroup.
  

• HM Rain Garden Tours Sun, July 12, 12pm – 2pm Where: Meet at the Hamline United Methodist Church raingarden located near the church parking lot at the intersection of Minnehaha at Simpson (Tour-goers are very welcome to make a pass through the Horton Community Garden time too!) Taproots is hosting walking tours of neighborhood raingardens to discuss and share wisdom about gardening, plant lore, and hydrology. Raingardens are a great way to deal with drainage problems, reduce runoff, improve water quality downstream, and strengthen native plants and the local ecology. For more information about the tours or Taproots, visit the group's blog at or contact Jonathan Dregni, 651-207-3539 or jdregni@yahoo.com.
  

• Midway Barter Market Sun, July 12, 1pm – 3pm Where: 1724 Englewood Ave Bring something to share if you can, we've seen CSA produce, jam, bread, fruits, homemade candles and soap, jewelry, cassette tapes, clothes, anything that's in good condition that someone else may want. It's an informal gathering that's lots of fun, and you get to take home stuff you want that someone else has too much of. Midway Barter Market also runs on Wednesday evening- see the calendar for more information
  

With all these events, we are sure to see you- Right?