Carrabassett Valley Public Library Community Garden

The Carrabassett Valley Community Garden serves the local and greater community by providing fresh, local produce and fostering connections through sustainable gardening. A vibrant hub for both nature and neighbors.

2025 Harvest Tally - Food donated to local food banks in Eustis/Stratton area so far.Mixed Greens - 100oz
Herbs - 25oz
Radishes - 16oz
Squash - 16oz
Broccoli - 4oz
Rhubarb - 12oz

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Updates

The Carrabassett Valley Community Garden serves the local and greater community by providing fresh, local produce and fostering connections through sustainable gardening. A vibrant hub for both nature and neighbors.Below is a recap of our weekly updates!

July 14, 2025
Well, folks, we had our first garden kidnapping of the year! I checked in on things last night and was really excited to harvest this blue ribbon squash, only to find this morning that it had been taken. Let's take this as a celebration of all the great work we are doing. I am happy someone will be enjoying it!Signage - This makes me think it might be a good time to create a sign of some kind explaining the garden, our mission, and maybe linking out to our website for more information. If anyone happens to know of a good place to print a sign for us, please let me know!Website Update - I am keeping a running tally of the food we have harvested on the home page here. I am also posting our garden update emails here. And I will soon be updating the volunteer page to be mobile friendly. I will keep you posted on that!Volunteering - Pink is taking charge with garden watch July 15-20, Nobuko will pick up after that. I will be out July 21-25, but will arrange for someone to take our harvest up that week. We are still looking for folks to claim the latter half of August. Feel free to sign up on the website if interested or reach out directly.July 14 Orientation Recap - Mary and Joyce swung by the garden this morning for a quick orientation and helped out with this week's harvest. Thank you so much for your generosity! Mary also dropped off some rhubarb from her personal garden. Way to keep those kicking this late into the season. Melinda from Stratton let me know someone would be turning it into jam for the community. If you are interested in an orientation session still, please let me know and we can arrange that over the next few days.Garden Promo - We are doing an interview with the Daily Bulldog this afternoon. We will also be having Katherine from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension / Master Gardener Volunteer program coming by in the next few weeks to check out the garden and maybe give us a few pointers if we are lucky. Please shoot me any questions you might have and I can have those prepared for Katherine when she stops by. She has also graciously joined our email group. Welcome, Katherine!Harvest & Garden Updates - We took in a ton of lettuce, herbs and radish this morning. We also took a smaller squash over to Stratton/Eustis along with some broccoli. I think we might need to put the broccoli leaves in a hair tie soon as they seem to be getting a bit bleached from the sun.One batch of cucumbers are doing well, but the other near the lettuce may need to be terminated to make some space for some late season seeds or transplanting of peppers that aren't getting as much sun. Thank you, Becky, for that idea!We will likely be harvesting at least twice a week soon, as the tomatoes, beans, peas, etc. are about to pop. And I still can't believe how amazing of a turnaround the celery has made after Chris' fertilizer application. Way to go, everyone!Recipes - If anyone has any other recipes for crops we are growing, please send them along. Becky thought it could be helpful to accompany some of the things we are sending up north with ideas for cooking, etc. For example, lemongrass isn't the most common thing for folks to cook with, she came up with some cool ideas for incorporating it into your morning tea. So cool!Feel free to respond with any other thoughts or ideas -- we are really grooving this year.

July 9, 2025
Hello - I hope everyone had a nice Fourth!Volunteering - we are fully covered for July, but still looking for folks to claim the second half of August. Please feel free to sign up here. Thank you Nobuko and Chris for stepping up last week for watering duties. I am on call this week before Pink picks up on July 15.Harvesting - we are still mostly working on herbs and lettuce. We did ship up about eight radishes as well, which looked really healthy! We will have squash, peppers, beans, peas, tomatoes and a few others to ship up to Stratton/Eustis soon. Some pictures included below of our progress. I will be out of town July 21-25, but plan on doing one last harvest on that Monday before I return on Saturday.Pruning/Weeding/Pests - It looks like the squash can use some regular attention. I've included a picture of an example of one that was showing early signs of rot that I removed. It seems like each plant has one or two of these that need removing every so often. Otherwise, the stronger squash are coming in really well! And no signs of vine borers like last year. Knock on wood!Dawn and Pink spotted the source of our aphid problem - the lupines at the edge of the garden. Everyone came together and moved swiftly to spray and remove. If anyone notices any other potential sources of distress, feel free to holler!Thank you Chris for handling some heavy lifting last week, including cleaning out and reassembling the compost bucket near the shed. Please feel free to use that for any trimmings or organic matter. We won't be actually composting any time soon, but it serves as a nice place to chuck any organic matter for now.And thank you to Dawn, Chris, etc. for donating and wrangling tomato cages. Hopefully I didn't miss anything!

June 29, 2025
Happy Sunday! Things are really starting to pick up :)Orientation Part 2 Reminder: Tomorrow at 9am we are going to have one more orientation/meeting with anyone who is interested in volunteering this year. If you can't make it, please let me know and I would be happy to schedule another time.Volunteering Update: Thank you so much for all your eagerness and cooperation so far this year. We have the calendar almost filled out, with some gaps in July remaining. I'm glad the website calendar seems to be working, but please let me know if you have any trouble or feedback. This week we have Nobuko on duty - thank you for stepping up!The Good: I checked in a couple times this week and things are looking great! We survived a dry/heat spell swimmingly thanks to Becky's patrol. Thank you so much for all your help and communication. It looks like Becky and Chris also chipped in thinning out some of the radishes and turnips, as well as caged and tied up tomatoes. We could always use more tomato cages, by the way. Also, did I mention our first tomatoes are already coming in?!Not So Good: We have started to see some pests in the mix, perhaps thanks to the rain yesterday. Ants are taking advantage of all the great flowering our squash plants are doing. Not necessarily the worst thing, but I suspected this could also mean there were aphids around. Upon further inspection, this was indeed the case! I squished the ones I could, but we may need to consider stronger methods if they persist. They seemed to mostly be around the lettuce from what I could tell.Other yellow flags include:
Carrots not looking quite as lush as the radishes and turnips. Not super worried about this, carrots have a much longer growing cycle. But something to keep an eye on.
Cucumbers are not really taking off like expected by now. The soil might be a little compacted/clay-like. I noticed this a bit in other areas (could be why carrots are struggling) as well and likely something we will have to address in the fall. Open to other ideas to turn things around.Hops: I also thought I would draw attention to a fun addition to the garden this year - hops! We have two brown planters you may notice that have started to sprout hop bines. They may look and grow like weeds, but please do not remove them. You can give them some water and a wave if you are on volunteering duty, though!Tomato Pruning: There's a bit of chatter about the different types of tomatoes we have and how to prune accordingly. I will try my best this week to identify what exactly we are working with based on what we planted this spring. For indeterminate tomatoes, I believe we will be trying to prune suckers to encourage tall, productive vines. We have quite a few cherry tomatoes in the mix, which will likely fall in this category. For determinate and semi-determinate types, we can likely skip heavy pruning, but it will be critical that we get rid of lower and dead leaves to keep good air flow. That was a killer for us last year!

June 23, 2025
Hello gardeners,Here's my first attempt at a semi-regular garden email update. I've included some photos of folks working on the garden and the progress that has already been made since June 2 planting. Thank you for everyone's help so far!This week's garden troubleshooting topic: Why are our celery leaves turning yellow? We'd love to hear anyone's thoughts!Volunteer orientation: Thank you to those who joined us this morning for volunteer orientation. We will be holding one more session on June 30 @ 9am for anyone interested in learning more. If that time doesn't work, please reach out individually for scheduling.Community impact: We hope to harvest as much as possible this year to donate to our food pantry partner in Stratton/Eustis while promoting communal gardening and sustainability. We've sent over two pounds of lettuce and herbs already with much more to come (including picture below of today's bounty).Volunteer opportunities:
Sign up here to be responsible for having eyes on the garden. We are looking for people to select 3-7 days at a time to cover us from July through September. If it's open on the website, it means we still need help!
Additional responsibilities include:
Watering
Harvesting support
Weeding/pest management/clean up
Always open to any other ideas to make the garden better!
If you run into any issues or have any questions, please email me directly.
Lastly - if you know of anyone interested in helping out this year, please have them contact me. Thank you!

About

Some photos from this year's progress!

Contact

Looking to get in contact with the team? Please reach out to [email protected].