The garden at Will's is starting to come up rather nicely. The paper that we laid has managed to stay in place after burying the edges. We do have a problem on one end of the lettuce bed however. One end the lettuce is coming in very well and is getting ready for harvest, but the other end is almost the same size as when it was planted. We suspect a fungal infection of some kind. Everything else is doing well, we even have a pumpkin plant that has spouted out of our compost pile. Will plans to transplant it into a pot and see how well it does just as an experiment. The project as a whole has done much better than I had anticipated. The compost took longer to decompose than I had thought, but it is looking good now. The only real problems are the one with the lettuce that I have already addressed along with a little leaf wilt and insects. With this inspiration I have decided to try a small container of my own on my balcony. I have planted peppers that are growing well, and cucumbers that are just now starting to sprout. Hopefully they will both work out.

Capitol School Garden Evaluation

Hello friends!

Things are growing splendidly now that the weather has warmed up! When I went to water this afternoon, I spoke with Mrs. Hill and have a complete things to update.

The lettuces and radishes are being picked by Mrs. Hill's students tomorrow! They are going to make a salad. There is one strawberry plant that has three small strawberries on it! She's very excited about what we've done there. I had to move the six hanging baskets to the front of the elementary school building (the blue building) by the terracotta pots. Some parents were complaining about the aesthetics of the hanging pots and replaced them with some hanging ferns.

After talking to to my group today, we decided that if we could change things about our project we would:

• Put the garden at someone's house to make it more conveinent to water, plant, and access the garden space.
• Grow on a larger scale. Some of us felt very limited by the size constraints of the Capitol School Container Garden.
• Would not have chosen certain vegetables that have frost-date constraints to avoid the planting towards the end of the semester when all of us are extremely busy.
• We wish we would have integrated our planting and seed starting with Mrs. Hill's class. We would have liked to do more with her class.
• We would have liked to talk to all of the teachers at the Capitol School to explain what we are doing, our goals, and how their classes can get involved.
  

We all agreed the lettuces and radishes worked really well. Mrs. Hill said all of the kids come look at the pots each day and are very careful around them. There are even some kids who have named each of the plants! We think we worked really well together despite our schedule, time constraints with the planting dates, and intended outcomes in this project.

Our overall evaluation of this project is that we are busy students who despite our scheduling conflicts worked together to give kids some vegetables to look forward to preparing a salad. There are still some more things that need to be done over the next week in preparation for our final project presentation. We need to finish the sunflower bed and plant the tomato/cucumber plants. Some of our group will be out there doing that Thursday and Friday.

Thanks for reading our blog.
-Capitol School Garden Group

Capitol School

SOoo.... Our compost project is doing really well right now. If you remember, we were the group that were doing the vermicomposting in the plastic chest of drawers type apparatus. We have continued adding food scraps and shredded paper. We have kept the bin in a semi dark place and therefore are able to keep moisture in the bin so as not to dry out the worms. Our worms are doing fairly well. We are hoping that sometime in the near future we can harvest some compost from the worms. We have tried to address some of the earlier problems we were having (mold and food not being broken down) and are making a little headway on that. In our project at the capitol school, we used compost from the farm and so we are very sure that it is a very rich compost. If we have to add substantial amounts of compost, we will probably get it from the farm or from the compost piles at the UA arboretum. As of now, we have not needed any more large amounts of compost and as I said earlier, hope to be able to use the vermicompost soon.

Garden Progress

The garden has two beds fully planted. We've halved the middle bed - one side broccoli, one side lettuce. We did this just because of the number of lettuce and broccoli we had - just enough to split a bed between them. On this bed we've used the unprinted newsprint as the primary mulch, however, we've run into a slight problem.

The paper mulch seems to shrink and crinkle as a result of watering, causing stress - when a strong wind picks up the paper tends to tear. I've had bad luck finding bags of pine-straw from people's lawns recently - hopefully some pine straw will help keep the paper down.

In the bed closest to the house, we have interplanted beets and cabbage, with the cabbage lining the outside and beets in the middle. The idea is that the cabbage tends to grow more slowly, and the beets grow fast, so we can have a couple succession of beets in the middle before the cabbage get too large and need more space. We're going to leave this bed with traditional mulch (probably pine straw) - this many small plants would significantly weaken a long sheet of newsprint with so many holes required, causing more tear problems.

The third bed will be planted with sunflowers and tomatoes, which are ready to go into the ground. We have both black cherry and cherokee purple tomatoes.This bed will use the newprint mulch because the size of of the plants and the distance they need to be placed away from each other, the paper will have less holes and stay stronger through the growing season. To augment the health of the beds we've used mushroom compost and small amounts of wood ash.

Implementation day!

We decided to transplant our plants on Tuesday March 30th.  Everything went wonderfully.  We direct seeded radishes, peas, and okra in the back bed. Once the radishes are ready, there will be more than enough room for the okra to grow. The middle bed was our salad mix that came from Jean and Carol's.  In the front bed, we put broccoli and cauliflower(picture on the right).  Most of that, we transplanted, but some of the cauliflower we decided to direct seed.  At the last minute, we decided to make a wildflower garden in front of the house (bottom left picture).  We broke up the soil and direct seeded a number of butterfly attracting wildflowers.  The only challenges we faced were objects in the soil.  We found large cinder blocks, bricks, trash, and broken glass.  Also, the raised bed in the backyard is entirely clay.  We decided to direct seed sunflowers at a later date to break up the soil.  For now, we planted some cauliflower plants in it(top left picture).  

The project thus far has been extremely promising. With the plants hardened by their time in front of the window with moderate amounts of stresses, including: full sunlight, higher temperatures, and wind, they were only recently added to the porch to grow indefinitely or to my liking. Some of the plants are having a rougher time than others. The garlic chives were limp during their first few days outside but have recently adjusted to the change. In general some of the plants' leaves have gotten a stringy yellowish hue to them now that they are outside. The watermelon have started to take off and have grown around 3 inches in the last few days.

As you can see the plants I set out to grow have grown and shortly will be harvested for the herbs that I said I would use. The plan took very little effort as far as building it was concerned. It is very low maintenance, takes up very little space, and requires watering twice a day. Once at 5 in the morning, and anytime to my discretion AFTER the sun has gone down. Can someone Identify the plant in the rocks? I can't find anything on the interwebs.