After last week posting my Matina Mystery about the strange green globes growing on my Matina tomato vine to the COMGAR mailing list and here on this blog and on twitter I’ve received several suggestions as to what they may be, from tomatillos gone wrong, or perhaps plant galls.  But I thought the best way to get to the heart of this mystery would be to cut into the fruit abnormalities and see what really was inside.

Well it answered one question, only to create another great big one.

They’re NUTS!  More specifically, something resembling walnuts.  So now the mystery is, how does a walnut grow on a tomato plant?  I understand cross pollination but never in a million years could have thought a sweet little bumble bee flitting about my tomato plant could deposit a bit of walnut pollen on my tomato plant and it would grow an actual nut right there on the tomato vine!!

And then, the other question is, what should I call this new interesting variety of nut, the Walmato? Waltina?

From our friends at Gardening Matters comes this announcement:

The Minneapolis Parade of Community Gardens is August 22nd.   It will be a wonderful kick off to National Community Gardening Week that was declared by the US Department of Agriculture.   Minneapolis & St Paul City Councils will be passing resolutions proclaiming August 22nd as  “Community Garden Day”, honoring each and every community garden and the hard work that everyone contributes to making these green spaces community assets.

It is important to show support for these resolutions being put forth by the cities so if you have an opportunity to stop by the City Council meetings this week please do so.

The entire process takes only 15-30minutes.  Quick and Easy. Let the city council know just how important these green spaces are to our neighborhoods.  You won’t need to say anything — your presence will say it all.

Minneapolis City Council Meeting
Friday, August 14, 2009
9:30 a.m.
300 5th St
Council Chambers, Room 317 City Hall, Minneapolis

St Paul City Council Meeting
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
3:30 p.m.
15 Kellogg W Blvd
Council Chambers, Third Floor City Hall, Saint Paul

The International Outreach Church Community Garden in Burnsville is working on a City of Burnsville Resolution also! Right on!! Date of Resolution TBA.

Parade of Community Garden brochures can be found at www.gardeningmatters.org or call 612-492-8964!

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I have had the joy of growing up next door to the Dowling Community Garden all my life, and while my own backyard is large enough that I do not need the space of a community garden, I enjoy walking by every day and watching the crops and flowers grow, and my neighbors tending to their plots.  I speak with many of them at Mother Earth Gardens each spring about what they are going to plant and during the summer we commiserate about the lack of rain.  Community Gardens are a most wonderous thing and there are not nearly enough of them in the Twin Cities, though we are fortunate that there are far more here than other cities,  as the Parade will attest.   Each year it is such a thrill to see how many more have been added to the Parade.

Community Gardens are not just enjoyable for me, there is research that more and more people are enjoying them. The makers of Scotts Miracle Gro (they do make an organic product now at least, and their research was insightful), sponsored a comprehensive white paper on gardening in America.   In it they state  “Among households that don’t currently participate in food gardening, 3 percent would be extremely interested and 4 percent would be very interested in having a plot in a community garden located near their home. That translates to an estimated 5 million households that would like to garden in a community garden in the future, compared to the 1 million households that are current community gardeners.”

Five million additional people could be joining the community gardening movement if we could only find safe and clean spaces for them.  And not only could this be helpful in creating a further sense of community, providing safe, healthy produce, and an enjoyable activity for the family, but according to a 2006 study by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University & the New York School of Law:  “The opening of a community garden has a statistically significant positive impact on residential properties within 1000 feet of the garden, and that the impact increases over time.  We also find that higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact.  Finally, we find that gardens have the greatest impact in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

Community Gardens can increase your property value,  more and more people want to participate, they provide an economical source of fresh produce that is good for the environment and on top of all that, gardening is good exercise and is one of the most enjoyable activities imaginable.  So if you can, please go to your City Council meeting, or send your regards to your representative in support of National Community Gardening Week and Community Gardening Day. Because with more support from our government, perhaps more of those 5 million people nationwide can have that chance to participate in this great activity known as Community Gardening.  Maybe one of them is you!

For more information on how to start a Community Garden, the American Community Gardening Association is a wonderful resource as is of course, Gardening Matters mentioned above.  The City of Minneapolis also has the specific details on rules for starting a Community Garden on their website.

After having new cedar raised beds built this year I decided to build some of my own pea and bean supports this weekend.  I made a trip to Menards to pick up a little 1/2 inch galvanized pipe with, some corner fittings, and pipe bracket supports and purchased the netting from Mother Earth Gardens and I now have some permanent supports to help utilize the ends of the raised beds for my broad beans and peas.

And I did them all by myself, no small feat for someone who doesn’t consider herself very “handy” usually.  The best part is that you can build these supports yourself very easily as well, and the galvanized pipe comes in many sizes.  I don’t suggest PVC as it reacts to ultraviolet rays and can become brittle.

There are, of course, other easy solutions for peas and beans, with many favoring the teepee method or you can get creative and make something that looks like a spider web for your peas.  But I like my galvanized pipe supports. Simple and didn’t take much time to make, and will be a nice permanent addition to my raised beds.

• The next Twin Cities Media Alliance brown bag lunch is Wednesday, 10/22, at the East Lake Library in Minneapolis, at noon, with Paul Schmelzer. TCMA’s blurb on Paul is pretty nice, so I’ll just give it to you: “Please join me for a brown bag lunch Wednesday, October 22 with Paul Schmelzer, managing editor of the Minnesota Independent, and a winner of the prestigious Premack and SPJ Page One awards for journalistic excellence. Paul coordinated the Independent’s outstanding coverage of the RNC protests – a subject you can ask him about at lunch. Paul also writes the blog Eyeteeth: A journal of incisive ideas, which appears regularly in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, and has written for Adbusters, Cabinet, Ode, Raw Vision, Utne and other publications.”
• Hennepin County has more rain barrels for sale. 18 left as of October 13. $62 each. This is your last chance. There are no more incoming shipments and no more will be sold after 2008.
• Urban Wanderlust has a list of all the goodies they’ve canned and/or frozen this year out of their garden, CSA share, or locally grown fruit. So cool. How many people even know what grows in Minnesota? I don’t.
• In case you wanted to know you can buy pepper spray at General J’s Army Surplus.
• Thinkery stops by the St Louis Park treehouse. I used to live kitty corner from that thing, but I never actually walked across the street to take a closer look at it.
• The Daily Planet’s Arts Orbit blog has an update on the behind-the-scenes situation at the Southern Theater. Drama!
• Also at the Daily Planet is an article from the MN Daily saying that, as bike commuting has doubled over the last year, so have fatalities to bicyclists. Injuries have increased as well. There have been nine recorded bike fatalities in Minnesota so far this year, vs four in 2007. (Note that that’s across the whole state.) I’d like to see a death-per-thousand-cyclist statistic similar to how they report driving fatalities. The (three, so far) commenters disagree vehemently, saying it’s been shown that injuries to bicyclists decrease as the number of cyclists decreases because everyone’s more accustomed to sharing the road. Insert “drivers and cyclists alike should follow the rules of the road” argument in which everyone blames everyone else [here].