September Springmoor Blog from the Landscape Department

Thom Morgan

Storing Seeds for Future Use

September is unkind to vegetables. By now, your 90-day tomatoes are a withered mess, and the 120-day tomatoes have a few green tomatoes that are struggling to turn red. Eggplants are producing fruit which is one tenth the size of fruit a month ago. Face it, it’s fall, and if you haven’t switched over to fall crops by now, your garden is a pitiful mess.

One thing you can do before you pull up all the stakes and dead vines is collect the seeds.

Springmoor Floral Focal Points: Plant a Row of Veggies for Charity

By Thom Morgan, Springmoor Landscape Manager

Thom Morgan

Springmoor Donates Spare Veggies to Food Bank

It was January 2009, and I was thinking about what Springmoor residents and staff could do in the way of a community outreach project when I heard of the Plant a Row program in which a lot of local organizations were participating. It seemed like a great fit for our community: Springmoor had a half-acre of land that we set aside in March 2000, and we had 24 resident gardeners who were very adept at growing fresh vegetables.

Plant a Row, by the way, encourages gardeners to plot one extra row of their vegetable garden and donate the resulting produce to their local food bank. I asked Springmoor Executive Director Fred Conner to see if we could participate and he thought it was a good idea; at the same time, another staff member approached him to see if Springmoor could participate in Stop Hunger Now, which is another community outreach program that helps malnourished residents of impoverished countries. Springmoor ended up taking part in both programs, and just finished packing more than 40,000 meals for Stop Hunger Now.