Preparation for Summer Gardens 2020

Hello everyone, I have been with St. Vincent Mission for 5 years off & on as a part time employee, volunteer, and intern. Now I’m the new coordinator for Grow Appalachia–that’s what you call moving up the ladder. I am ready to encourage others and provide materials they need to get started in a successful growing season.

I jumped right in, contacted all participants to schedule pickup times for materials and scheduled tilling jobs needed to get their gardens started for the summer growing season. We provided fertilizer, garden tools, seeds, gloves, sprinklers, hose sprayers, and water cans to help get them started. It was a blessing to meet so many wonderful gardeners that I will be experiencing my new journey with this year.

We work as a team at St.Vincent Mission. The director Erin Bottomlee helped me organize our garden shed. Greg Wagner has been a volunteer at the mission for a few years now. He is planting everything that goes into salsa in our high tunnel this year. He maintains the gardens and high tunnel on the weekends due to living at the volunteer house. It sure is a blessing having great team players helping me get started on my journey.

Tylor Moore and Giovinni Perez are on the internship program. Steve Slone is my husband that volunteered to help with tilling gardens. Tilling gardens was my main priority to get done so they can start gardening. There were a few gardeners that requested to extend their gardens this year. We have encountered many new participants anxious to start growing their own food, not knowing what is going on with the food chain due to Covid-19. Here are before and after pictures of some gardens tilled in April.

We extended this garden 13 feet wider and 4 feet longer. She is ready to start her growing journey.

Our second garden the same day was a community garden at Grisby Heights housing. They have 4 residents that help maintain and harvest this garden every year. We provide seeds, soil, and pots for a few residents that are unable to help with this big garden. We provided them their voucher, fertilizer, seeds, rain barrel and a stirrup hoe to help them on their growing journey.

This garden was extended 50 feet. They are new participants and stated that they would like to extend the garden 50ft to provide more to the community in need.

This is one of our community gardens that we tilled for the Big Sandy Community College. We provided them with all the materials they needed to get started on their growing journey. They have students from the college to help maintain and harvest throughout the growing season.

The City of Prestonsburg is our community partners that provide us with soil, manure, and pots for our community container gardeners and the missions’ garden. They signed up to be a participant on our program and requested a little garden tilled to start off with this year.

Here are some more gardens that Tylor, Govinni and Steve tilled this season to help our participants get a great start on their growing journey.
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Here is the last garden tilled this season. Steve and Giovinni did a wonderful job on this 200′ x 80′ community garden.
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This is St. Vincent Mission gardens that Tylor Moore tilled for us. Tylor did an awesome job at tilling all our participants gardens this season.

There are some neighborhood kids that come volunteer once or twice a week to learn how to garden. Here they are helping Giovinni transplant horseradish outside. Trenton is weeding my strawberry bed. He has planted peas and beans for me too. Two of our volunteer workers are planting my ever-bearing strawberries for the growing season. I bought snowy strawberries to try out this year too.
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