A Green Advent Calendar

Green Advent Calendar

Feeling especially close to nature this year? Not wanting to contribute to the immense environmental burden, each holiday brings? Check out this Green Advent Calendar by Earth Ministry.

Recycling Christmas Lights

Your Creation Care Ministry is teaming up with St. Louis Green and Operation Food Search. Recycle your Christmas lights in the barrel in Albright Hall and the proceeds of the sale of the raw material like the copper wires will go towards Operation Food Search. Visit their web site to learn more!

Our Fall Crop from Gardens of Grace

Our Fall Crop is here!
Blessed to grow and happy to harvest, our Grace Creation Care Ministry team members collected the first abundance of fruits and veggies. The parishioners were delighted to get their hands on the freshest food ever! The donations collected reached over $100! Thanks to the generosity we were able to send this amount to our local foodpantry, Kirkcare. We are looking forward to have a second harvest soon. If you are interested in helping out with the Gardens of Grace, send us an email at: gracecreationcare@gmail.com We would love for you to sow seeds, tend to the crop, even if you have no experience. Neither did we!

Sunday school plants seeds

Thanks to Sue Nixon and her sunday school class, the children were able to plant lots of lettuce and radishes last sunday. This will make a great addition to our broccoli, kale and snap peas. We are hoping to donate the produce and show the children how easy it is to plant vegetables!

Community Garden update

After a great start with lots of baby tomatoes, the squirrels won the race and canned each one of them. We also lost our corn, that Charlie planted each by hand! Sorry about that. Our basil though blossomed and we turned the ship around by making St. Basil's Pesto. The donation income from the pesto is a great relief to pay for our irrigation system and to plant a fall crop. See above.

Creation Care Ministry Team mentioned in Kirkwood-Webster Patch article

We are so blessed to have a wonderful article published on the Kirkwood-Webster Patch website about our green team. Take a look!

Earth Day is on Good Friday!

22nd Annual St. Louis Earth Day Festival

You are invited to “Be the Change” in honor of this year’s

Earth Day celebration on Sunday, April 17, from 11 a.m.

to 6 p.m. on the Muny Grounds of Forest Park.

Enjoy two stages of live music, cultural performances,

local food and hands-on activities for the whole family at

the 22nd Annual St. Louis Earth Day Festival. Over 200

artists, educational exhibitors, food vendors, businesses

and organizations will share how they are “Being the

Change”, and how you can too!

Community Garden Details

With the idea of a community garden a year ago at one of our Creation Care Ministry meetings, came also the big question of: How are we going to go about this? St. Matthews in Warson Woods was a great help in terms of example and viable information. They have now 6 plots 4x8 sqf and have been through one successful growing season. Our parishioner, Charlie Moley, was incidentally looking for an Eagle Scout Project and decided on a community garden. How perfect is that? A wonderful God incident, is what I call it! We will follow the square foot garden approach as much as we can since it's the easiest way to grow lots of food in small spaces.
Our soil will be a mix of compost (hopefully free horse manure), peat moss and vermiculite.
We have raised some monies to start us on the building of the structures. We are planning on 4 4x8 raised beds on the south side of the playground by the handicap parking.
There are still lots of open questions which we will address at our next meeting, this Sunday, April 17th at 11:20. Please come and join us. Brainstorming makes it possible!

THANK YOU for your donations to the Community Garden

A big thank you to Charlie Moley, who created a superb poster to present in Albright Hall for sponsorships of garden plots.
We have raised over $450 that way! The congregation is really excited and will be blown away but all the produce God will grow. We are so blessed to be able to do this with all the help we are receiving from the congregation, the vestry and interested community members. Plant sales also went well. The Holgates and McDowells received over $400 worth of donations for their tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, basil and many more species! We still have to raise more donations, since the irrigation alone is quite costly.

Community garden Planting Schedule

Here are some quick dates for planning put together by Rob Holgate.  Not sure we will plant all of these but here is the info anyway.  These are based on the average last frost date for STL of April 7th.  These dates may precede some suggested dates by a week or so since we are working with raised beds which warm up more quickly in spring.

The week of:

Feb 7

Start eggplant, peppers inside

Feb 14

you could start some lettuce inside if you want to, to do higher maintenance early starters (watch for frost like a hawk) and then do another planting every 2 weeks.

Feb 21

start tomatoes inside

Feb 28

Plant outside:  peas, spinach(and every 2 weeks),

Mar 7

plant lettuce outside (and every 2 weeks after)

Mar 14

Plant outside:  carrots, radishes, (and every 2 weeks after), also onions, chard

Apr 4 (week of average last frost)

Put tomatoes out, plant dill out

stop plantings of spinach

Apr 11

Plant out: beans (bush beans more every 2 weeks, pole beans bear continuously so only plant once), cucumbers

Apr 18

Put eggplant, peppers out

Plant out squash, melons

Apr 25

plant okra out

stop successive plantings of lettuce, radishes in a bit, carrots and bush beans can go on for 4 more weeks if anyone is still not tired of plantingThe harvest:

May 1

will have us in the middle of spinach, radishes, lettuce, chard harvest

Jun 1

will have us in the middle of carrots, chard, peas, summer squash, cucumbers and the start of the beans

Jul 1

will have us in chard, beans, squash, 1st eggplants, 1st peppers, 1st tomatoes