Alix Ingber: May at the Sweet Briar Community Garden

Alix Ingber

May is a busy time for the Sweet Briar Community Garden. We always kick it off with our Cinco de Mayo celebration — so named because the first year it happened to fall on the fifth of May. We start off collecting dues, then eat all the wonderful food people have prepared, followed by Tim’s announcement of the annual garden awards, a bonfire, and sometimes music and a hotly contested game of horseshoes. The college supplies us with tables and chairs for the occasion, and we keep it green with reusable dishes and utensils.

For those of us who started planting in March, it’s time to start harvesting lettuce, radishes, and broccoli. Our community asparagus is also at its best, and the strawberries are beginning to ripen. There are also spinach, carrots, kale, and collards planted in the fall to harvest, as well as new spinach and the first snap peas.

May is also time for more planting. It’s time to get in our tomato and pepper seedlings and to plant corn, summer squash, cucumbers, beans, okra, and whatever else strikes our fancy.

Our main fund-raising activity is the production of our signature hot sauce, so we need to get the hot peppers planted. Eggplant seedlings will have to wait; since we do not use insecticides, we have to wait until the flea beetles disappear in midsummer. This is also the time the potato beetles arrive, so gardeners keep them under control with a combination of organic remedies and removing them by hand.

This year we have had lots of rain — which has been wonderful for our newly planted crops but also has produced an abundance of weeds. Our main weed headache is wire grass (also known as Bermuda grass), which develops deep and spreading roots and never seems to go away. Since we don’t use herbicides, we spend a good deal of time digging it up, going deeper and deeper and never entirely succeeding (but always hoping we finally got it all). We transfer the wire grass we have removed to a pile outside the garden so it won’t continue to grow. Other, less troublesome weeds are put in our compost bin.

This spring Tim added an extension to our pavilion, so our Cinco de Mayo dinner, with rain threatening, was entirely under cover. We also terraced one of our strawberry patches, which in the past had not done well because it was on a steep incline. Scott is working on an extension of our water lines so we can extend access to water to some of the more remote plots.

One thing we have learned over the years is to expect to be surprised. Some years a crop will be incredible; other years it will be a bust. Last year we lost all our zucchini, normally one of our most dependable crops. So we diversify, keep an eye on things, and hope for the best. If something doesn’t work this year, we’ll try again next year — or try something else. —Alix Ingber

Alix Ingber, who has taught Spanish at Sweet Briar College since 1980, is a Buildings & Grounds guest blogger who is contributing occasional updates on this season’s progress at the Sweet Briar Community Garden. You can read her previous update here.