The summer schedule for the HCV Garden groups is starting to wind down. This is the second full season for the Highland Community Vegetable Garden and we have had great success so far! Over the summer, we engaged more than 128 community volunteers. Sixty-Four of are volunteers were youth from the local community. In September, Kalfas Magnet School, home to the HCV Garden, will once again recruit students for their school garden committee. We still have plenty to harvest at the garden: carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupes, and all kinds of greens, even small pumpkins and gourds. At this rate, the students might be harvesting with their Project Orange Thumb gear until is snows! All of our community partners would like to give a big THANK YOU to Fiskars and Project Orange Thumb…your wonderful award has made a big impact on the HCV Garden and on the Highland Community of Niagara Falls!!!

bookmarks

Now that the temperatures in Central Texas have gone from hot to VERY hot, both our gardens and our gardeners are struggling.  Lately it’s been in the low 80s overnight and daily highs in the low 100’s with heat indexes reaching 111 degrees!  Too dangerous to be outside for any length of time.  The only crops producing right now are the peppers and black eyed peas.   Even the Asian long beans and eggplants that usually thrive in the summer are doing poorly.

In addition to the heat, we’ve had an infestation of field rats.  They’ve done a lot of damage to the gardener’s crops, especially cantaloupe and watermelon.  If nothing else, they have good taste!  We’ve set up traps and so far have caught 21.  The last several days we haven’t caught any, so I believe we’re now ahead of the problem.

We’re all very much looking forward to the cooler temperatures of Fall, when we can plant our cool season crops and actually enjoy being outside again.  Fall is our most productive growing seasons of the year, and by using frost cloth we can grow all the way through Spring.  Summer in Central Texas is basically the same as Winter in the Northern States – everyone stays inside and plans out their garden for the upcoming season.

Our Ribbon Cutting Ceremony is scheduled for next Saturday and we’re doing our best to make the garden look as presentable as possible, given the time of year.  Part of our event will feature a pot luck breakfast, with the gardeners bringing dishes that feature food they’ve grown, or purchased from the local Farmer’s Markets.  Our mission is to promote local food and sustainable living, so all of our events highlight locally grown food.  I can’t wait to see what everyone brings! 

Stay tuned for photos next week!

bookmarks

The kindergarten children were both fascinated and impressed with the new garden in their playground when they returned for the start of Term 3. We had left all the trees/bigger plants sitting on top of the garden in the approximate planting positions and the children were certainly keen to get planting.

Over a number of kinder sessions the children, with the guidance of their teacher Lisa, put all of these trees and plants into the garden beds. My son, Oliver, excitedly took me around to the garden one afternoon and declared ‘that’s my apple tree, that I planted’. The other children have been proudly showing their parents and carers ‘their’ plants as well. Lisa tells me the children love learning about the garden and plants and are very keen to get to wear the special orange t-shirts. There have also been lots of questions about when the fruit will be ready to eat! This is certainly a positive step in encouraging these young children to eat fruit.

We are very pleased with the progress on our Sensory Garden and are delighted at all the positive and encouraging comments from parents in relation to this project. It has certainly transformed a bare and under utilised area into a well visited and interesting space.

bookmarks

On July 31st we had our ribbon cutting ceremony. 30 volunteers and family attended. We had a very warm sunny day. We are now in our 34th day of 90 degrees or above. We are going for a record. The heat has made our garden grow rapidly. Squash, corn potatoes, green beans, onions, tomatoes, cabbages are all getting ready for harvest. This garden has brought the reservation community together. People who only knew each other are working side by side in the garden. Many friendships have formed . The garden has taught people that if they work together as a team they can accomplish many things. Fiskar has made a dream a reality. We now know that we will be able to service by eating from our garden. Thank you for all your help. The team is now planning for next years garden to be bigger and better. It has been a wonderful experience for the elders to share time and experiences with the children of the tribe.

bookmarks

Hello

I’ve posted some more pictures of flowers from our beneficial insect garden (thanks Fiskars – Project Orange Thumb!) and also veggies from some of the garden plots.

Its been a very hot summer and we’re still working on increasing soil fertility at our site, so we hope to see higher productivity in the future.

cheers

Caralyn

bookmarks

I was at Trouser House the other afternoon – and a breathtaking sunset inspired me to document the oncoming evening in photos.  Granted, twilight probably isn’t the best time to take pictures… but I think they turned out pretty well overall.

Being August in New Orleans, the heat and humidity has been crazy intense!  The two main Trouser House girls moved here about a year ago from Texas (one from Austin, one from San Antonio) – and neither of them expected it to be quite like this!  We manage, though.  As such, we have a few less crops than expected this month – but overall, everything is beautiful.  We are growing many herbs (3 varieties of basil, sage, ginger-mint, and sweet-mint), sweet peppers, spinach, and okra.  We attempted to grow melons, but it turned out that our raised bed was too shallow for that endeavor.  Live and learn.

We’ve been developing a rainwater catchment system over the last few months – you can see the bright orange barrels in one of the pictures below.  We are going to catch the rain running off the roof into the barrels, and use it to water our garden.  The barrels are raised so that gravity forces the water to come out with some pressure when we choose to use it.  We are currently experimenting with various plumbing techniques to see what works most efficiently.

Trouser House and community painted its first permanent-installation piece: the Mural!  It’s a beautiful collaboration of farm interpretations by various members of the community, coordinated by a local mural artist.  (I painted the lady in blue!)  The painting of this mural was in conjunction with a local event, ReFest – the kickoff event for the newly organized ReUse District.

Our chicken coop, which was showcased in my last post, has been functioning perfectly.  We’re actually building a chicken run behind the coop, so that the chickens can be free to move around some more.  I managed a snapshot of the unfortunately named “Chicken Nugget.”  A few months ago, we were hosting a WWOOF‘er (World Wide Opportunities with Organic Farmers volunteer) from Tennessee.  She loved hanging out with our chickens and taking care of them – and one day she turned to this poor fellow and said that he looks like a chicken nugget.  Likely because of his unfortunate tan coloring…  Anyway, the name stuck!

The most permanent animals on the farm, though, have been our two farm kitties: Flora and Fauna.  They’ve been with us since December.  They’ve grown a ton since then (they were only four weeks old!), but now they definitely hold their own… and eat a lot!  But they still have kitten faces and love to play with string and wads of paper.  Thanks to Flora and Fauna, the farm stays safe at night!

Well, that’s about all I have for you for now.  Enjoy the show!

bookmarks

It has been a super hot summer here in Georgia (just like most of the rest of the US) and our community garden has been struggling.  Additionally, we have been watering our entire garden with one hose that we have to drag around to the different plots.  Not an ideal situation!

Well life is now a lot better at the Milledgeville Community Garden.  On Saturday July 24th we installed many, many feet of PVC pipe and we now have 4 water spigots located throughout the garden.

It was a very long hot day.  Work started on 7AM.  We were lucky to have Dean Clark (of Clark Bros Plumbing and wife of Jan Clark who is on our board of directors) provide expertise and ditch-witch driving prowess.  You can see him in the picture above.

Of course the day was not without minor mishaps. At one point the ditch-witch stopped working, but after some mechanical tinkering and cooling off (you know its hot when the machines stop working), it was running once again.  And in the end we prevailed and at approximately 3:00PM we tested the new water system and it worked!

bookmarks

Last week we made a plant part salad made entirely of ingredients from our gardens. On Monday we harvested garlic from the Westside Village Magnet School Garden for our delicious salad dressing.  Then, on Wednesday we started off the day with a morning harvest of roots, radishes and beets (a couple varieties of red beets from a neighbor’s garden and Chioggia pink and white spiraled beets), chard (stems and leaves), speckled lettuce, snap peas (fruits and seeds), bachelors buttons (flowers), and a super generous fellow community gardener let us harvest one of her first ripe tomatoes! We also threw in a kohlrabi! We diagnosed our potatoes with blight, so we harvested them.  We headed to the kitchen and roasted them up with some oregano from our plot. The abundance of kale was made into delicious kale chips!  It was incredible to taste so much fresh food just after it was harvested- and even more meaningful to know where all of it came from and how it was grown, harvested and prepared! We can grow fruits and vegetables in Central Oregon!

bookmarks

This past week of August has really been great for the Garden of Dreams!!  Waunakee Neighborhood Connections, a near and dear organization that has been graciously accepting our produce this summer signed up to care for the garden, and did an awesome job.  Our tomatoes have been coming in really well, so each of the WNC clients took home more than they will ever know what to do with last week.

As you  may remember from earlier posts, Corina Rogers and I have been working alongside Second Rain (an up-and-coming environmentally friendly company) to create a proposal for a WaterShed.  Second Rain has never built one of these sheds before, although they have been perfecting the design for some time now, and we are honored to host their first shed!!  Ultimately, this proposal will have to go before the school district’s Facilities Committee, as the shed would be built on school grounds.  We have gone before the committee once (in early July), but that was just to allow the members to look over our rough-draft proposal.  Hopefully, the Facilities Committee will pass our idea, and we can get to building the shed!!

The upcoming few weeks are going to be busy in the Garden of Dreams.  Besides three Waunakee Neighborhood Connections harvests, we will be harvesting twice to collect produce for the Food Pantry as well.  If time is on our side, we will also be going in front of the Facilities Committee and working to get our WaterShed proposal passed.  Maybe we will even start construction!!  Amid the regular watering, weeding, and general caring for the garden, we will also be applying for a few new grants.  Although the money Fiskars gave us (thanks again!) was extremely helpful, we will still need a bit more to cover the cost of the WaterShed and other projects with the Second Rain company.  Wish us luck!!

bookmarks

We began building our chicken coop back in January of this year. It took a few months of trial and error before we finished. Below are some photos of the process.

We used almost exclusively reclaimed materials for this project, all except for the chicken wire, in keeping with our reuse- and recycle-based approach to farming. This approach not only goes challenges us to go deeper in promoting earth-friend sustainability, but it also makes our techniques more accessible and affordable for our community.

We got the baby chicks at the beginning of May – and they’ve grown unbelievably quickly! It’s amazing that only a few months ago I could hold one of them in the palm of my hand, and now I have to run around the yard to just get a’hold of them – I can barely catch them with my TWO hands. We hope that they will start laying eggs within the next month! The past few months has been a time of bonding and learning for both the flock and Trouser House community. I don’t think anyone enjoys them any more than the kids who come to our gallery openings, perhaps expecting to be bored with art and talk – but are instead pleasantly surprised by clucking buddies!

bookmarks