Pictures around the garden

As we come in to the final days, the garden is looking great.  We also have some ongoing projects like painting the garage, building railings on the bridge, and today we finished repairing the sculpture.  

 The inside of the shed has been organized

 Cabbage and peppers

 A red hot cherry pepper

 Some Thai peppers

 The onions look almost ready to go

 Tomatillos

Some cabbage looking very good

 Tomatoes growing strong in the potato bed

 The potato bed

 Some of the plants that were hit by the beetles, but hopefully will recover

 The beans are growing well

 A cucumber

 Tomatoes and peas

 A lot of peas

 A transplanted corn stalk

 Tomatoes

 Some ripening tomatoes

 One of the sheep

~Sean

Paintin' Scrapin' & Buildin'

This week we've been doing a bit more work around the landscape, which are jobs that Professor John Rosales asked us to do.  This includes scraping and repainting the garage and resurrecting a sculpture.  

Below is a photo of the garage where we keep many of the tools and where the cold frames are currently being stored.  To the left (out of the photo) is the shed with the rooftop garden that I've been working on.

Front of the garage with a fresh coat of paint

The other day I finally settled on some plants for the rooftop garden.  Hesitant at first because I was unsure which would best take root, I chose to go with a succulent called "hen and chicks."  I bought them from the farmers market from a gentlemen named Guy Drake who is quite knowledgeable with plants and is always at the Canton market with his variety.

The shed (equipped with the new door)

The hen and chicks will test out what can survive in the rooftop beds

 

The sculpture that I mentioned before was first built by a SLU 2012 graduate as a senior project and was knocked down by a storm.  It is supposed to look like a door made out of various stones, but as you can see the grasses have overtaken the fallen rocks and no one has had the time to fix it.

The beginnings of our cement work to rebuild it

It worked like a puzzle, finding where each stone should fit

About halfway done!

So... we ended up running out of cement after the halfway point and had to go buy more.  We will continue the project today and post a photo of the finished product!

Garlic Update!

Laura, a GardenShare employee with some of the ESL garlic

Even though there was initially an overwhelming amount of garlic, people have quickly claimed the bulbs:
 -Laura is running a "food box program" that will help teach community members how to cook good food at home, with a focus on those with diabetes and nutritional needs. 
-Campus kitchens will use them in upcoming meals
-Another local farm has asked for some of our elephant garlic bulbs so they can grow their own!

It's great to see how the garden and our work here is becoming intertwined with the community members and organizations. Sean and I look forward to seeing these connections grow.  Only one week left now, what an experience it's been!

-Sheila

Potato Beetles, New Door, and a lot of Garlic

Hard to believe there are just under two weeks left in this internship!  It has been flying by, and the garden for the most part looks great.  We had our first pest issue, though, just this weekend, but expect our plants to recover.

 These Colorado Potato Beetles were found in our potato bed over the weekend.  We sprayed with a pesticide approved for organic gardens, and removed all the beetles we could find.  We are hoping that most of the plants that were hit will be able to make a comeback

 The new shed door, assembled, painted and hung in place

 Our many strands of garlic hanging in the house!

~Sean

The Magic Thing About Berry Season

 

 

A handful of garden berries, perfect for the hot day!

What's magic about berry season?  No matter how much you pick, there are just as many or more berries the following day! 

The past few days, many of us here at the ESL have been sneaking out to the garden to grab a few blueberries and raspberries.  Sometimes it's just a handful, other days I watch full containers leave the garden.  Well --I think to myself-- I guess I'll have to wait a few days until there are ripe blueberries again.  MUCH to my surprise, the next day there are a tremendous amount of berries that grew and ripened just overnight. 
If you've ever had a blueberry or raspberry patch, this is nothing new to you.  But for me, especially in this heat, each day is a joyous occasion and surprise at all the berries available for picking!


On another note, I've been experimenting with the different plants in the herb garden located in the raised bed furthest to the back.  You can see it's location in this photo from when we were constructing the raised beds.

The herb bed is made from cinder blocks, all the herbs were planted before we got here

Now that the plants are in full bloom, I've been having fun with a dehydrator that Carrie brought to the ESL, drying camomile, lavender, chives, and oregano so far!

The tiered dehydrator allows for drying many herbs at the same temperature all at once

Carlene, one of the GardenShare employees, was nice enough to bring in a book on dehydrating food for us to look at.  I'm hoping to read a bit of it on my free time and maybe experiment with some fruits and veggies!

--Sheila

Here's a photo of the completed door!

Kudos to Sean!

All it needs it a latch!

Bring on the heat!

Well this weather forecast is quite interesting considering the past few weeks of rain and mild temperatures I've grown accustom to...  We're now looking at high 80s, humid but little rain, and even the big 90 on Wednesday.  I just hope that the rain forecast for Thursday comes true; I really understand now why farmers always hope for some rain-- watering is time consuming!

In light of all this, Sean and I didn't let the hot weather keep us from being productive (Maybe because it's Monday and we aren't exhausted yet) and we both found ourselves doing some laborous jobs today.  I think that we've begun to realize that our time at the ESL is ---dare I say--- winding down in weeks and therefore it is time to actually carry out the jobs that we said were on our long-term list.


I worked on redoing the paths in between the raised beds, which required cutting spare cardboard to fit between the beds, kind of like fitting puzzle pieces.  Cardboard breaks down fairly easily and will kill off the grasses between the beds to lessen the threat of weeds infesting the beds and also give it a clean look.

This cardboard actually came from the boxes that delivered the raised beds!

Once I had finished, I put hay down to mulch the paths and, hopefully with time and rain, they will become smooth and grass free!

The finished paths.  With sun the hay will turn a yellow color!

On the other hand, Sean tackled the construction of a new door for the shed.  Although he has done various projects before, he's never made a door before, so I think he was excited about the new experience. 
Here's some snapshots of the process I got while taking a break from path-making!

cutting the wood

nailing the piece together

FINISHED PRODUCT!

In other news, I also harvested some berries for Campus Kitchens today, a student-run organization that we are in the works to build a formal partnership with.  They cook dinners on Monday's at the Methodist Church in Canton for community members to enjoy, and today they enjoyed some of our garden's blueberries and raspberries!

A bag of ESL blueberries, there are still many more that are ripening 

So the mantra for this week is definitely Get going on long-term projects, Drink lots of water, Don't let the sun make us go crazy as we work, and eat some berries when necessary :)

-Sheila

Rapid Market Research!

This week I got to spend a bit more time working with GardenShare, as we carried out a "rapid market survey"at the Canton and Potsdam farmer's markets.  The Canton market is on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9-2 and Potsdam hosts it's own on Wednesday and Saturday from 9-2.  We preformed the assessment on Friday in Canton and Saturday in Potsdam.

The idea behind the survey was to find out how people were shopping and to assess ways in which to improve their experience.  Rapid market assessments follow a "dot format" to make it easy and hopefully fun for market-goers to answer.  There is a photo below shows what this looks like. 

The big 4 questions we asked were:
1. How often do you shop at the market?
2. How much time have you (will you) spend at the market today?
3. How much money have you (will you) spend at the market today?
4. What did you (will you) buy? 

This photo was taken mid-day at the Canton Farmer's Market

In addition, we would try and ask those who stopped by for suggestions on how they would improve the market and if the times worked well into their schedule. 

In Potsdam, responders noted that they would like to see more of a variety of farmers selling produce, whereas their was an overwhelming amount of Canton market-goers who called for later hours on weekdays to accommodate work schedules.  

I'm interested to see the results when we crunch all of the data, but there were some conclusions that I could draw from just two days:

- Canton's market drew a majority of retired folks, and this is chiefly due to the weekday timing

- Market-goers tend to buy more produce than anything else... they also are calling for more of a variety of farmers selling produce

- People enjoy the social aspect of farmer's market
- People tend to shiver and duck away at the word survey
- More places to advertise are in the Adirondack Park area for families on vacation and also on university campuses because students tend to forget the times
- Various visitors from places like Connecticut (and even as far as Arizona) noted that Canton and Potsdam actually have an impressive market in comparison to the ones near them!  

As I slipped in there, it was quite exhausting at times trying to get a passerby to take the survey.  I can see where the attitude would come from, not wanting to be bothered while meandering through the market, but our survey is really for the betterment of the community and the market!  In the end, those who avoided eye contact and murmured that they "just don't have the time" were only hurting themselves by not getting their opinion heard.  
On the other hand, some participants were quite enthusiastic and gave us some fantastic ideas, such as offering more prepared food and even starting a booth for people to bring their composting food scraps. 

I think that we got a good amount of data collected over the two days and I definitely have some fresh inspiration for integrating the farmer's market into the SLU student body and also helping to make improvements to play to the interests of the Canton/Potsdam community members.  

Garlic Harvest!

On Thursday and Friday we harvested our garlic.  We came up with 198 heads of garlic!  Here are some photos;

 The now empty garlic bed

 Another shot

 

 Some of our day lilies

 Potatoes are thriving

The upper garlic bed, now empty as well

 Our pile of garlic, set out to dry

 Some flowers blooming from the potatoes

 Different potato flowers

 A lot of garlic!

 Some of the bulbs were huge!

~Sean