Seeds of Hope Are Growing at Albert T Mills Community Garden

Hello to all those that are interested in our growing Community Garden here at the Albert T Mills Enrichment Center – an inner-city ministry for pre-schoolers from some of Atlanta’s roughest and most impoverished areas. God has been good to help us water and nurture our seedlings, and we are excited to share with you that progress. We anticipate a wonderful bounty – praise Jesus! We continue to need helping hands to tend the garden, so if you are interested, please reach out to us via our website. No amount of time is too small – all contributions will help us to provide for a wonderful harvest. And of course, financial support is greatly needed! If we could find just TWO GARDEN SPONSORS for $50 a month to help with our water bill and maintenance costs, that would be a blessing to us. Is that you??? As with all gardens, there is lots of weeding, tending, and fertilizing needed to move from planting to harvest. Today, we decided that due to the heat (up-words of 80 degrees), that earlier in the day was better. A big thank you to Joan Obrien who is always so willing to help. Lowes was very generous to provide a gift-card to cover some of our on-going maintenance costs to stake, support, mulch and feed our plants. So you can bet the first stop was to fill up the car with as much as it could hold!

Considering this was a kudzu field just 6 weeks before, we seem to be winning the battle with weeds, but it is clearly going to be an on-going challenge. We hope to start a “Kudzo Brigade” with our summer school children, to keep our garden ahead of the creeping weeds striving to return to their homes. We were excited to see all the new growth! Here are a few glimpses… We have a nice crop of pepper plants that look like they will yield quite a bit of flavor

The green bean seeds that were generously provided by the Atlanta Food Bank appear to be the bush variety – so get ready for lots of picking throughout the summer. And lots of pots of yummy and fresh green beans.

We added a few tomato cages and trellises to give everything a little support. We hope that the organic plant food that we lovingly worked into the soil will encourage plenty of new growth. The cucumbers in the back were ready to have something to grow on – and look to be raring to go!

We snugged in all the plants with pine straw to keep the fruit up off the ground. We could not believe how many small tomatoes we found growing in our many plants. Get ready for spaghetti sauce, BLTs, or some fresh sliced tomatoes (straight off the vine) with a little basel…

We provided a climbing trellis for the yellow squash plants, which look to be doubling in size each week. They are sharing a space nicely with the cherry tomato plants:

And the zucchini looks like it is growing well too – we will have to start looking for the blossoms to turn into small green missiles soon.

We even have a couple of watermelon and cantaloupe plants that have broken through. And a fine crop of sunflowers appear to be reaching upwards.

Our crowning glory that no self-respecting garden can do without – our corn is growing too! Some of our volunteers sure planted a straight line for us with a special “green thumb” touch:

We are proud to say that things are going well for the first crop ever from the Albert T Mills Community Garden. If you would like to support our garden, or provide much-needed volunteer time weeding and tending the garden, please reach out to us on our website or Facebook page. God will bless you and we will thank you. Now is your chance to make a difference, and help those without food to know God’s bounty! For more information on how you can help, please feel free to email me directly at Dana.carrier@gmail.com or visit our website at www.atmills.org.