It depends on what you plant. Initially starting with easy to plant and harvest crops which do not require labor intensive thinnng and harvest might be best. ie. tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini NOT harvest intensive beans and peas or ones requiring careful seeding ,thinning, weeding, or cleaning....ie. carrots, onions from seed Crops that can be harvested all at once and do not require frequent harvest are also good ie. onions, potatoes. Schedule a work day and snack/meal and make harvests day a fun social time for the volunteers. Black plastic (with tiny holes to allow water through if, like us, you are not running drip tape or other irrigation) and other mulches are your friends. Weeds are not. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini planted through plastic are much easier to maintain....mostly water, fertilize, and harvest. Not near the weeding maintenance that many volunteers do not enjoy. Most pantries around me do better with donations of produce that will keep without much care or refrigeration. Again, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, zucchini, onions, maybe cukes, all work well for them. NOT lettuce. Talk with yours to see what they can get to people while it is still in good condition and plan your planting accordingly. I've done 4,000 sq ft with the crops mentioned and managed it with one other person.....We spent a few long days getting it tilled (It had been a garden previous years) and planted early in the year and after that both of us were there 2-3 long mornings a week. We got along well and got to know each other well. One of us had alot of gardening experience and the other had in depth knowledge of the organization who owned the land. We had access to a tiller and basic garden hand tools. The garden did not always look pretty but it produced alot of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and zucchini. In fact, we had to find a second pantry because the first did not have many clients who wanted our prolific hot peppers.....we learned to work with the pantry early and plant crops they had demand for the next year. If you know you have good, reliable, season long help (and sometimes those who assure you they will be, disappear in a few weeks)consider crops that require more weeding, cleaning after harvest, and watering. Might be best to get a year in first though, to see how things go and add the higher maintenance veggies later. Enjoy the successes and don't let any failures you encounter drag you down. Lots of people will be thrilled to have fresh produce.

GGG, we will be eagerly awaiting the photos I'm sure you will be taking as your efforts come to fruition. You always have such a wonderful sense of color and design! The yellowing maple and walnut leaves are slowly being stripped from the trees. I was surprised to come upstairs and see that it rained a bit during the night. The wind is starting to pick up too. Looks like our rainy season has indeed started here in Northern CA. We haven't gotten much, but just enough that I haven't had to water -- hooray! My cherry tomato 'Sungolds' are gamely hanging on. I'll try to keep them going as long as I can. The taste of these turned my tomato-hating DH into a tomato lover! The short bouts of unseasonable cold we kept receiving in the late summer/early fall have totally confused the spring-flowering bulbs and plants, because we'd get just enough warm days in between to encourage the rest of the garden. So my rhodies are budding and my freesias are sending up leaves, all a good 3 months early. Other CA gardeners have reported the same thing, so I'm not alone in this unusual scenario. You can garden all year 'round here, but we don't get those beautiful displays of fall color due to lack of consistent winter chill. Where we live there are 3-7 frost days per year -- not snow or real cold, just where the temps dip below 32 degrees overnight, then warm back up to the fifties in the daytime. Still, the dampness saturates the colors and makes the yellowing leaves of the Japanese maples and sweetgum trees stand out in the grey overcast: My beautiful bearded iris are blooming again, which they do 2 or 3 times a year. Best free gift I was ever given! The coral passiflora vine is happily invading the neighbor's yard. Fortunately it's a rental house now and they don't seem to mind that it's winding through the tops of their nandina and bird-of-paradise. It flowers all year long so at least it's a pretty intruder:

Very short driveway, and that safety orange cone by the boulder? Does that remind anyone backing out of the garage to be careful? :) And Don, it was no less than what I expected to find in any garden you touched, or really any project you set yourself to accomplish. Great detail in the use of white to define the hardscape. Love the shape of that arbor, breaking away from always straight lines one comes to expect with wood structures. Honestly, do you do all this work, including maintenance, yourself? Do you have hired help? How large is your garden anyway, to have all these well laid out non-cramped beds. Did you landscape it, because it is very professional looking. And, I've lost my way to THE LISTS....where are they now? I know some were moved to Pieterje's site, or so I think, and I cannot find it. Looking for the THEME GARDENS specifically. Need to submit a few more. I now have the HOSTA FINDER to browse through, need to see your lists. Sorry if it is off topic a bit, but I was going to email you with this question, and here you post, so......excuse please? (but where is it)

Linda, the rock was a handme-down from a neighbor so I tried to use it. Longterm I'd like to replace it with a more gentle gravel like the rest of the paths. I wasn't aware that it may alter my soil, that is indeed good reason to remove it quickly. Take a seat here Lynne: Or here: Or here(if you're not afraid of Costco chairs!): I prefer to rest up here. The breeze tends to blow the hammock around more and it puts you much closer to the birds and chipmunks. It was a necessary place too for birdhouses and food that my mole-hunter can't reach. -Will