Great Start for the Farm at Stratford

It was a interesting first year on The Farm at Stratford

It started to rain in May and didn't stop until the middle of July. The wet conditions and the introduction of the Late Blight made growing anything a tough jog. Yet a lot of vegetable were produced. If you wanted to asked for the worst growing year in recent memory then this would have been it.

The DR mower was delivered this week !! This gift from Ms. Ellie Hawthorne will make keeping the land under control as it constantly tries to over take the Farm.

We had a total of 56 plots opened and cultivated. Some folks dropped out which is normal for community gardens especially considering the rain and appearance of the fungus known as Late Blight.

What did the gardeners learn? For on thing how when nature doesn't cooperate its hard to get things to grow. They learned that planting a diversity of plants of different families is important. The Late Blight attacks plants in the nightshade family such as tomatoes and potatoes. Some folks only planted tomatoes and lost them all.

We all learn about this particular piece of land, where it is to wet in the spring (and summer this year). Where the drainage is good and where it isn't. We learned that making raise planting beds helps with very wet conditions and parcels that don't have the best of drainage..

Gardeners learned that if they had to depend on the weather and coping with plant diseases to provide all their food for a year ..they would have all died of starvation.

All in all it was a great start to the Farm at Stratford. We are already active in planing the next season and will be working on more sustainability projects over the winter.

I'll be working on getting the Green House up before the early winter too.

Thanks to everyone for participating, thanks for your effort and patiences.