The joy... and the pain

Hello everyone,

At our last club meeting and in the days that followed, we got a lot of things accomplished. New eggplant, summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers were all seeded out. We also put many new things into the garden outside -- transplanting more cabbage, leeks and onions. We also direct-seeded several fun things, including two types of carrots, two types of beets, and kale and swiss chard.

Special thanks to Ms. Selvie and the Hill sisters, who stayed late on Tuesday to get a lot done ("It's 6:07?!?!") as well as to Ms. Hubbard for coming today and Ms. Ebright and Mr. Capozzi for helping out, too!

Next meeting, we hope to paint some signs that we will put up around the garden to inform people of what we are doing (and to try to discourage littering in the adjacent areas). We cleaned up the entire lot and area around it as of a few weeks ago, but now that people are walking around more outside the litter is building up around the perimeter again and even blows into our plot! Grr!

Finally, the sad news. It appears that I have worked the Troy-Bilt tiller that I had acquired for fairly cheap to death (at least, a temporary leave). Stupid me, I should have paid more attention to the fact that small machine motors often go through motor oil at an extraordinary pace. Despite the fact that I just changed its oil one week prior, the unit had burnt up all the oil inside. Even though I replaced the oil that was missing, the damage was already done. Despite letting the motor running it on very low w/ the new oil for a bit, a loud grinding sound developed in the next hours. I expect that the next time I try to run it, I will either not be able to get it to start or it will have lost a lot of power, with any drive left in it to quickly deteriorate. Sigh...

I am planning to replace the motor (mounting a new one on), so if anyone has an old piece of yard equipment w/ a working motor but busted somethin'-else, or knows someone who does -- please email me at our club's external relations email -- sciencekidsveggies@yahoo.com

Until next time!

Sorry!

I just realized that my mis-posting of a classroom note to this blog sent an email out to all of you. Please ignore that; it was intended for my chemistry classes. Yes, I fixed it, and they got the message!

Before leaving for break... we break the earth!!!

So, Doro and I spent a long day last week Wednesday, and got the garden that much closer to being ready for direct seeding. Doro was a composted fertilizer-spreading machine, and I duct-taped the broken gear shifter on the tiller well enough that she'd stay in first, giving me enough control to start turning up some soil!




It was nice that a young boy from the neighborhood, Caleb I believe his name was, stopped by on his way home from school and tried to help us out for a bit:




I say 'tried' to help because shortly after appearing to be a good, hard worker, he was getting awfully distracted by things, and began to slow both Doro and I down. In my opinion, he ultimately ate more oranges that I brought for snacks than he earned. Well, at least he seemed to enjoy the experience :)




This all happened six days ago, before we took a short break to visit friends in Colorado. Today, I came out and, after fixing our gas-powered mower (yay!) cleaned the paths between the rows. Tomorrow I'll be tilling at 6-8 inches deep... wish me luck! After that, I might drop some imported soil on top as a final touch, and we'll be ready to start bringing our plants and seeds out...

Stay tuned!
Matt

PS -- I can't wait for spring break to be over, so our club members can rejoin in all this fun work that is involved with running a garden ;)

Last meeting... new salads, peppers and tomatoes seeded!

Well, we're going to get back on schedule with our blog posting soon, I promise. Until then, please accept my report on the last club meeting, this past Thursday, approx. one week late.

We planted a ridiculous amount of new stuff, while a few of my chemistry students got service learning hours for helping me spread more of the composted horse manure. In total, probably about 400 different salads, greens, tomatoes and pepper embryos all got to rest in a warm, wet bed of soil. Hard to imagine that they start no bigger than a peppercorn and end up producing so much food when mature.







If you're like me, you're probably thinking "hey, four hundred is a lot, especially since this only covers about 1/6th of the varieties that you planned to grow this year!" Well hey, we want to be safe, and make sure at least some of it makes it to our tables a couple months from now! If we have extra transplants in need of a home by the time late April rolls around, we can give away or sell some of them and raise some more money for the club.

I'll send you some pics of the wonderful progress we made yesterday in just a few days...

best,
Mr. Mikulski

Busy without me... =)

Yesterday the vegetable garden club met up and, I am very happy to report that the four members that showed did an awesome job of taking care of business without being told how or what to do. You see, I needed to go out to the plot to find more rocks and mow the tall stuff leftover from last year. While I was outside with a few volunteers, these four ladies of the veggie garden team took care of three things:

1) mini-potting the rest of the garlic
2) deciding on a watering schedule
3) writing a rough-draft thank you letter to a recent donor

Here's some pics of how tall the previously mini-potted garlics already are, and how much our cabbage has grown:




Hard to imagine in about 2 1/2 more months that these little plants will be a huge, dense ball of sweet nutritious deliciousness!

Speaking about donors, I think we've decided how to use SGA Youth & Family Service's donation -- they will provide us with the potting soil and fertilizer we'll need for our garden. Our more recent donation, which came from a local church, will probably be used to purchase two more water storage containers and to buy the supplies needed to build a total of FOUR rain catchment structures.

I was so excited thinking about the future of our garden, that I took a few minutes of time after school to plant some seeds myself:



We've been getting used 36-er egg cartons from Uncle Mike's on Grand, so these days its easy to start up a batch of pretty much anything on a whim! Although you can't see it, what will sprout from these little compartments is mustard greens, spinach and a baby lettucs mix. Mmmm!

Soon, we'll get a student member back on track with making the posts here... you see, right now there are so many new clubs, sports and other activities, that I'm having to rope the members outside of our core 5 or 6 in one by one...

-- Mr. M

Special Project #1 -- clean up the lot!

So we had some students from outside the veggie garden club come in to help us with the first of our three special projects -- Cleaning up the trash, branches and rocks from the site. We thank them for this, but in the end they will also be getting some Service Learning hours for their help (so we thank them in a most appropriate sort of way ;).

The other two special projects that we've planned outside help for are spreading the organic fertilizer (two weeks from now) and building the rain catchment systems (four weeks from now). Here are some photos from day one of the cleanup:








It wasn't too bad, as the weather was warm (but windy). It was fun to meet some new students, and to get something else accomplished! Tomorrow we'll work the perimeter and remove more of the 'eyesore' type trash that is less of a problem for the tiller but more of a problem for looks...

Our meeting on March 1st (getting close to direct-seeding time!)

Hey everyone,

So usually Latezia (one of our student members) is the one making the posts to the blog; however, on Thursday, during our meeting, she informed me that her home internet access was a bit shaky at the moment. So I offered to post the pics from our activities in her stead.

We got a few things accomplished. #1, we potted garlic that had started shooting and rooting into paper cups.

#2, we prepared the wood crates that will be our produce 'boxes' when the season starts.


#3, we finished designing the flyer that students will use to try and recruit ten more members from the community. #4, we figued out that Google Groups stinks at trying to create email groups, and decided to swith to Yahoo Groups. If you get an email from Yahoo Groups, that means you're on our mailing list!

- Matt