OL 304 Assignment Six Homework
Online Learning:
Vegetable Garden Care & Maintenance for Family Gardens & Community Gardens
Center for Sustainable Development


https://csd-i.org/vegetable-garden-care-family-gardens-community-gardens/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Six Discussion
Magee Example Project Assignment Six
IDEP Home & Community Gardens Module 6 – pp. 138 and 142
Permaculture Manual – Garden Africa

Assignment 6. Garden planning, seedlings in containers, and transplanting seedlings
Part One: Planning the next garden

You can do this assignment as you go on your follow-up visits – or you can hold a short workshop.

You should still have the list of crops that your gardeners planted from a few months ago.

During your follow-up activities last week, you should have asked your gardeners if there are plants that they don’t want to plant again and if there are new plants that they would like to try (assuming that seeds are available). From this, make simple list.

Secondly, ask them if they’re going to keep their garden the same size – or make it bigger for the second planting.

Next, meet with your agriculturalist partner and talk to them about seasons and planting cycles in your region for home gardens. Show him an example list of the kinds of crops your gardeners would like to try, and get his feedback as to whether he feels that their decisions will be successful in your region.

Based upon this meeting, you should now have a feeling that — for example — you should plant onions every two months or every three months, or that you need to wait until March to do the next planting.

In a meeting or during your follow-up visits, have your gardeners draw their garden map again, and locate on the map where they might dig new beds and where they would like to put which crops — making sure that they rotate them out of one bed and into another. Also make sure that they are planting a variety of different things in each bed in order to confuse insects.

Work with your gardeners to help them understand what the planting cycle is in your region. Discuss with them the idea that they can plant seedlings in containers 6 to 8 weeks in advance of planting the seedlings in the ground.

At the end of your meeting with the family they should know what they want to plant, when and where.

Part Two: Planting seeds in containers
During your follow-up activities last week you should have asked your gardeners to begin collecting containers to plant seedlings in two weeks — or you should consider providing your gardeners with plastic seedling bags.

You will need to continue your plan for purchasing seed that you established with the community in order to have seeds for this planting cycle; they may also have quite a few seeds left over from the last planting cycle.

You might want to have a short workshop to show them how to properly plant seeds in containers, label them, and water them gently. Then when you go on your follow-up visits you can help them with planting their own seeds in containers.

Part Three: Transplanting the seeds outside
Since transplanting will occur in about eight weeks, you might just want to pencil in a short meeting for eight weeks from now to show them how to transplant your demonstration seedlings from the containers into your demonstration garden.

The homework to turn in will be:
1. A very simple description of the planting cycle and typical planting dates for home gardens in your region. Also, are different types of crops planted during different seasons in your region?
2. A short list what one of your families is hoping to plant in the next planting cycle. Have there been any additions of new plants they would like to try?
3. A short list of what that family is planning on planting in containers.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment 6 to see what this could look like. See you next week.