The flame tree

Hi, everyone this is jasmine it turns out that the trees that i thought were bananas are not actual bananas. They are really called the flame tree. My mom told me that they were banana trees and i got so excited that i wanted to take a picture and blog about it. I dont feel so bad about it because my mom told me and i actually found out on my own that they are not what it seems. I made a huge mistake about it. One day, my sister and I went over to the trees and we decided to take it down. As we got closer we realized it was no banana tree and we peeled the skin off. When we peeled the skin off we saw 2 big peas inside and we were so disappointed, because we really wanted it to be a banana tree.

The flame tree

A dose of sweetness

Hi everyone. Mr. Mikulski here. Just wanted to share a couple pics of yesterday's harvest. Unfortunately my phone/camera is not working, so I wasn't able to take a photo of everything I had picked and packaged, all in the back of the truck. That looked amazing, let me tell you -- ten vegetable boxes, packed to the brim, and then an extra big plastic box full of, well... extra produce, and then there were enough melons for everyone to have one -- filling in the few remaining spaces in the truck bed.

I WAS however able to make a photo once I got back from share delivery at Arrigo. Here are four remaining shares, the box of extras, and the remaining melons:

Josie-eye view -- Mmm!!!

Aerial view -- If you look closely you can guess what kind of produce Josie got her hands on

Melons are nice, huh? It's nice to have something desert-ish in the box, for a change. Here is one share up close:

I moved the mizuna greens off the top, so you could see everything in the box

The truth is that there was other stuff to harvest, too -- stuff like smaller cherry tomatoes, corn, and possibly potatoes. But since it was raining on and off during the normal harvest time yesterday, nobody else showed up to help pick stuff. I usually have at least one other adult out there with me, but no such luck this time. So I just picked as much as I could from 1:00 to 4:00 and then called it quits...

I reckon we'll keep having stuff to eat until at least mid-October -- and I don't think it's just me being optimistic. Because we're not over-fertilizing, the plants aren't getting exhausted early on. Also, I just looked at a calendar, and, geez, Harvest Week 1 turns into Harvest Week 12 so quickly. It has been a great ride so far, hope you all are enjoying it too!

Until next time!
Mr. Mikulski

The banana trees

Today, as i was on my way to school. I saw 2 big banana trees outside in front of my house. I decided to take a picture of it because i never saw a banana tree before and it was a surprise to me. I was so amazed. My mom told me about it but i never had a chance to go look at it myself, because i have always been busy. But, today i decided to go see it because i thought it was kind of important to blog about it. Also, I wanted people to believe that we really had banana trees growing in chicago, because some people dont believe we do so here is pictures to prove it:



This is the first banana tree

This is the second banana tree



The trip to the wild!

On Friday, August 10th, 2012 was a fun day for me because we took a trip to the wild. We experienced different things like seeing nature: Dragon flies, bees, frogs, grasshoppers,etc.. We were in Des Plaines, IL. Its about 30 to 45 minutes from Chicago. First we stopped at Mcdonalds and had a good breakfast ( sorry i don't have the pictures for that). I was so scared to go inside of the woods because i thought something was going to attack me. But i still went in the woods and ran into a beautiful pond:

Also, along the way we picked berries and put them into clear containers. We are goin to make maybe grape juice out of it. We only saw one kind of  berry and that was the blueberry. We tasted it and it was very sweet. We had a hard time trying to reach the top ones because those were the good ones and it was more on top.

These are one of the blueberries that we picked

This is another container filled with berries

This is a pond with frogs but you cant really see them

We were afraid to go in there

We've impacted google maps!!!

hey everyone,

I was just google-mapping the neighborhood around our vegetable plot, and saw that the new Google Maps scan has aerial photos showing the plow lines that Doro and I made back in April:

How cool is that? I feel like we're changing the world, one small square at a time... :)

Mr. Mikulski

I'm Back!!

 Hi, everyone this is jasmine and i finally got my internet back on so I'm back. Today, we watered everything in the garden. We also had some vlunteers to come along and help us. It was this nice lady who works at the school, Ms. Thompson, with her 2 nephews : Jonathan and Jeremiah. They were great helpers. We found out that they had a garden as well.

This is the corn plant with the Aphids but you can hardly see them because they are so small.

I found out something interesting about the corn plants. We found out that there were little green bugs with black legs they were called Aphids. They suck the juices right out of the stem. But, there were three types of bugs: Ants (both little and big), Lady bugs and the Aphids. The lady bugs helped us by feeding on to the aphids so that they wouldn't suck the juice. The Ants were actually like farmers, they wait until the Aphids poop or pee and suck on it. It is actually kind of sweet to them. Even though, you cant see it but Mr. Mulkulski told us that.

These are the volunteers that came along and helped us out:Jonathan and Jeremiah

I also did something that was fun. I lawn mowered between the plants to keep the weeds from getting badder. I mowered all the rows. I thought of it as being fun to do because i never did it before.