Eight of us gathered on this unseasonably warm fall day in the Teaching Garden â the area between South Street and the ranch house at the Bagaduce Music Lending Library site. Our mission was to build raised beds that will be ready in the spring to accommodate small seedlings and shrub donations whose permanent homes on our site are not yet ready for planting. For the past year, we have been gathering various materials that will compost into a rich medium for planting. These ingredients were the building blocks of our soil building workshop. Once the two wooden frames were assembled we began filling each with a layer of wood chips (the byproduct of our woodâs editing workshop last spring) th
Early November is the end of the season at Mainescape, and we were given the opportunity to glean from the remaining unsold native plants that could be added to the NGBH partnership garden site. This garden is primarily shady with a variety of soil conditions, and we designed many natives into this garden landscape that day focused on how they would best thrive and add visual interest. Five volunteers were busy first weeding areas to be planted with drifts of single species, and then setting these plants in the ground. As many of the plants were approaching dormancy, we did not use fertilizer when planting them to avoid a resurgence of growth just when they should be preparing for winter. We
