Gardens do not thrive on neglect

We just returned from a week in California leading a group of young people to work on repairs to a couple of aging city church buildings and some houses of low income and/or elderly members of the community. It was nice to sleep in a bed instead of a church floor surrounded by giggly teenagers, but it was not nice to take a stroll around our backyard garden! If a giant asteroid hit the earth and wiped out most life, I don't think the last thing alive would be cockroaches...it would be Bermuda grass. Yikes! I am not looking forward to the task of getting it out of the raised beds.

We have everything on drip irrigation, but this time of year I usually do a daily walkabout and provide supplemental water on an as-needed basis. Other than the Bermuda grass invasion, most things are still alive. I haven't seen any major casualties, other than the tomatoes, but I don't think I can blame their demise on lack of water. Because we took our portable pop-up canopies on the trip to shade people,  the poor tomatoes had none, and they really need it this time of year. There are some yellow squash and Japanese eggplant which grew to a harvestable size while we were gone, and the sweet potato vines are thriving. There are nice long vines on the winter squash, yardlong beans, zipper cream peas, and Armenian cucumbers, but no fruit yet.

One of the churches where our team works has a number of pocket gardens on the property, worked by people who live in a nearby subsidized apartment building populated by refugees from Eastern Europe and Asia. Many of these refugees suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and gardening is therapeutic as well as a source of economical and nutritious food. Some plots are maintained by homeless people. The church has a "Co-Op Cafe" serving the homeless which utilizes some of the produce. Here's a picture of some of these pocket gardens at the edge of the church parking lot. Anywhere there is a patch of dirt, someone will use it to grow food! I'd love to see this idea spread to other communities.