Wednesday, May 25 Planting

Yesterday avid H.E.A.T. gardeners dedicated a few hours of their afternoon to planting the final seeds and plants into the garden. . 

After scavenging around for a while in the nearby woods, we collected stakes for our fast growing tomato plants and for trellises for the peas and morning glories.  This was followed with a little weeding and watering to make sure what was already planted could thrive.

 Olivia O., Jenny, Ana, Ivy, Zia, Kelsey M., and Ms. Basdekis planted tomatoes, peppers, squash, pumpkin, eggplant, beans, and morning glories.  Dr. Nix's awesome ESL class donated some tomatoes, eggplant, and pumpkin for us to plant in our garden.  With these new additions, the garden is now officially full including two patches outside of the fence that house our flowers and squash.

We are all really happy on how the garden is looking and we are anxious to start harvesting what we have planted! (Although we still have a lot of time to wait). 

We look forward to your help and support this summer and in the upcoming year.



Zia and Jenny planting some peppers




On the right, peppers are being planted
On the left, the tomatoes are being planted



Securing the tomatoes to their stakes

Jenny's new friend

Trellis

Planting the eggplant



Olivia's Natural Selection Experiment: Eight onion seedlings; which one will prevail?

Gearing Up for Summer

As we are nearing summer, the garden is almost in full swing.  There are a lot of vegetables in the ground and the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are anxious to be planted (By the way we have a TON of eggplant and tomatoes, more than we have room for.  If you want some we can give you some!) At the moment we are trying to figure out the most efficient way to water the garden.  Luckily we have a great maintenance staff who has really helped us out, but we are hoping that we can come up with a rain catching device.  While we are working on that, this rain is great!

Our most exciting new addition to the garden is our compost pile!  We have teamed up with the kitchen and they are fully on board of collecting organic waste from their prep work and giving it to us to bring down to the garden.  We have already brought down two loads of compost and it is clear that this is a big operation due to the amount of compost we are collecting.  Another thing we have to concentrate on is maintaining the right amount of green (compost) and brown (leaves, pine needles etc). 

If you are interested in helping us out over the summer please look to our calendar and plug in the dates that you are able to help out. (I hope the link works)

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?hl=en&tab=wc&pli=1&gsessionid=TWHJAmAovtA-uRlK65biYA

May Planting

We had a very successful planting this past Sunday!  The weather was gorgeous and the garden looks gorgeous   Thanks to Emma, Petty, Megan, Morgan, Elizabeth and Leah for joining Olivia and Ms. B in the first day of planting in the garden!

 The garden

Yummy soil...!

 The planting was accompanied by a little picnic!

Emma enjoying the sun (and imitating the sunflowers that she was planting!)