Next Garden Work Day: October 17, 2020

On Saturday, October 17, Jeff Stoner will be coordinating the garlic-planting starting at 10:00 am.  

A good way to complete your community hours for 2020.  

Please text or call Rick Werner (216-543-1969) if you need more information.


Kentucky Garden Work Day Recap - October 10th, 2020

Many thanks to the 20+ Kentucky Gardeners who pitched in on Saturday to clean ALL of the market plots and get prepared for the garlic planting on October 17.  It was a perfect day to get a lot of work done.

Everyone worked hard to harvest the remaining produce, clear the plots, stow the tomato cages, and prepare the plots.  Special thanks to John Kalas and Diane Shoemaker for the hard work of plowing all of the market plots.  

Thanks as well to Masud Hasan and Michael Mishaga for making sure that we got to all of the projects that needed to get done.


Fall Clean Up:  Saturday October 24, 2020

THIS YEARS FALL CLEAN UP AT KENTUCKY GARDEN WILL BE HELD ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24TH BEGINNING AT 10:00 A.M.  WE ARE MOVING UP THE DATE DUE TO THE GENERAL ELECTION AND PEOPLE WANTING TO VOLUNTEER FOR IT ON OCTOBER 31ST.

PLEASE BE SURE TO BRING A PAIR OF GLOVES WITH YOU.  A DUMPSTER WILL BE PROVIDED BY THE CITY OF CLEVELAND AND COUNCILMAN MCCORMACK.

THIS WILL BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO CLEAN OUT YOUR PLOTS AND PLANT WINTER RYE AS A GROUND COVER.  BAGS OF THE SEED WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR A $1.00 DONATION.


Covid-19 Warning

Ohio’s Director of Health encourages us to garden and it can be done safely if we:

1.  Stay home if you are not feeling well;

2.  Adhere to social distancing practices – stay 6 feet apart from our fellow gardeners and wear a mask if you are closer than 6 feet apart;

3.  Wipe down the handles of all the garden tools you have used including the wheel barrows, lawn mower, weed wacker and tillers with the bleach water and paper towels that are in the field house.

4.  Wash your hands with soap and water and use paper towels to dry your hands;

5.  When leaving the garden, take a paper towel dampened with bleach water and wipe down the gate handle and lock on the front gate;

6.  No picnics, meetings or other social events will be allowed in the garden this season.

7.  For your own and other’s safety, the Cuyahoga County Department of Health advises that if you are not feeling well (fever, cough, shortness of breath, muscle aches, stomach ache, headaches, diarrhea, loss of taste or smell, runny nose, chills or fatigue) stay away from the garden for at least a week after you are symptom free.  If you have had the Covid 19 virus, it is advised that you remain at home for 14 days.

8.  The Kentucky Garden Steering Committee reminds each gardener to take responsibility for their own health and safety during the COVID crisis, as the Steering Committee functions only in an advisory role to facilitate gardening at Kentucky Garden, and not in any official capacity.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE CALL GAIL LONG AT 216-751-1499 OR EMAIL HER AT [email protected]

Have you completed the 2020 Census yet?

If not, you have three options: by mail, phone, and for the first time ever, online.

Participate online (https://my2020census.gov) or call 844-330-2020 to be counted!

PLEASE COMPLETE THE CENSUS 2020

Tomatoes to the rescue

     How many years? Three. Four? Maybe five? So many that I was starting to feel stupid planting them at all. Like some crazy man who every year dug out all the weeds and grass and crap out of a 10 x 10 plot in the backyard, bought six or seven tomato plants at $4 or $5 a pop, then carefully planted them and caged them, knowing full well that the plants would grown, but would never grow tomatoes. Then in the fall, or winter, or early spring at the latest, dug all the miserable desiccated failures up, returned the twisted tomato cadges to their spot behind the garage for another few months, until it was time to repeat the process.
     Then I would repeat it again—and here's the sad, sick thing—I had given up the hope of growing tomatoes. I didn't plant a garden because I expected tomatoes. I just planted it because it was one of the nutsy futile time-wasting things I did, like writing books.
     OK, I exaggerate. There were tomatoes. Hard, green spheres that were even worse than nothing at all. The promise of a tomato. Then a long span of waiting. Then a stone mockery.
      Not this year. First the cherry tomatoes came in, a ruby red vanguard. They arrived in platoons. En masse. They were sliced into salads and popped, liquid sunshine, into my mouth standing in the garden. They're out there now. I can't eat them fast enough.
     But they were just the opening act. To my amazement, they were shoved off center stage by the Main Event. These big guys, the size of baseballs, and in quantity. It didn't even matter if the squirrels got a couple, because there are a lot more where they came from. We filled our arms with tomatoes and took them back to the house. My wife put them in salads with fresh mozzarella and basil—also grown in the garden—dribbled with fig vinegar. Tomatoes accompanying omelets, or just set out with fresh fruit as finger food. They are that good.
     I have a way of anthropomorphizing objects. I can pity a lost sock, picture it slouched on a wooden bench in bus station in Toledo, having slipped out of the dryer and set out searching for a truer mate.
      And the tomatoes, arriving as they have in the suckiest summer ever. Deciding to show up now. Well, I can't help but suspect that maybe the tomatoes were withholding their forces. Waiting in reserve. Like reinforcements. Knowing how massively 2020 was going to suck, massively, with its COVID-19 and economic entropy, its travel bans and our jabbering dupe of a president growing more unhinged by the hour.
     Sure, they would have added flavor and color to 2019. But would we have appreciated the way they're appreciated now? I think not. Fresh-picked tomatoes I grew myself are a lifeline in 2020, a reminder that not matter how we fuck up the world, with our carnival of cretinism politics and our shredded social fabric, our bottomless fear and outsized hatred, that we can't touch tomatoes. They come through in a pinch, in their own sweet time, sometimes when we need them most.

Rust Belt Riders

If you are interested in a residential composting service, check out Rust Belt Riders.

Mention Garden Members Code: KENTUKYGARDEN10 for a discount. The code applies to both  pick-up and drop-off services

More information can be found at:  Rust Belt Riders