Monday, June 21, 2010
Sow...is it summer yet?
The Solstice has arrived and with it no more predictions for rain for the week. The hot June sun is doing its job by warming away threats of precipitation by mid morning each day and sending those clouds up and out of the way. Warmer temps seem to be reaching normal levels ranging from 55-80 during the days. The gardens have shown signs of improvement as well. The tomatoes have greened up and are starting to spread, the peas and greens are growing well. In Silverton, I made another 200 square feet of gardening space by removing sod and planting vetch and grass. Then I hoed out the grass a few months later and double dug the beds to raise them up. I made one long running bed about 25 feet long and 3 feet wide and 5 raised hills for planting my hot crops and storage crops. The soil was workable and next year it will be better because I will use two types of winter cover crops to give the soil good protection and increase the tilth. Linden's garden has been doing better after receiving the most rain of the other gardens (because of its proximity to the coast).
I gained two more centers who are anxious to get gardens started; they are Jose Pedro and Settlemeier. The buzz about these gardens and the activities our children are doing with them has excited centers all over Oregon. My job is looking busier and busier as the gardens warm up and people warm up to the gardens. Yippee! The interesting aspect to these two new centers is that they lack ground space for food production. Each center at OCDC is individual and take on the terms of Head Start in creative ways. It takes time to analyze what would work best for each center. The centers lack gardening space but they will have some grand container gardens. I am great at container gardening. I hope to dot their outdoor space with massive containers full of food that is visually stunning. I hope to create an ornamental look with a food functionality. So...what plants will I be using. Well I will absolutely be using Swiss Chard because it is my favorite plant to grow right now. They might contain Kale, Fava Beans, Winter Peas, Parsley, Leeks, Cilantro, Carrots and Parsnips, cabbage, and broccoli. We will also be planting blueberries in containers. We hope to create a stable container garden practice for each center. I hope that this new garden style will be applicable to our home garden plots as well as our centers who similarly lack safe grounds for food producing. I hope to show our centers and the readers that space is not the biggest limiting factor for gardening among cost, access to water, creativity and time.
The new crop of kids has been fun. They are all sons and daughters of seasonal or migrant workers who have traveled to Oregon for our busy ag season. The ranges of skills and behaviours these children exhibit is wide so the classes have been a bit tougher. I am adapting the teaching style for these classes to be more camp based. There are crafts, story telling, harvesting, etc in shorter and easier to understand segments. This week we will pick a plant and draw it and write a few words about it on some paper. It will become a book of plants for each center to have made by the children and for the children. It will compromise a series of arts, observations, and literacy work for our children. My Spanish has been getting much better. I am able to understand a lot more of what my children mumble and have been able to communicate better with them and our teachers. I have been excited to use my Spanish in each class. I am looking forward to better weather and bigger crops. Good luck in your gardens and classes!
In the photos that precede this post you can see our children at Silverton harvesting some salad. They gave it to their kitchen to cook salad for them today! What a treat for all of us.
How does your garden grow?
TIME TO PROPAGATE YOUR TOMATOES: You like to pull of those "suckers" right? It makes your plant grow stouter and stronger right? Meh...maybe. Don't throw them in the compost. Take your suckers ( at least 2 inch long ones) and propagate them. With the soft start to our summer providing cloudy and humid days, you have got a great climate for producing some more plants. If you get em now, you might be able to pull off some more tomatoes or replace ones beat up by the rains.
Love Lupines: Need a beautiful native perennial that withstands lots of water and a bit of shade? Need one that fixes nitrogen to improve your soil and your plants health? Need one of the first plants to return from the blast zone of St. Helen's 20years ago? LUPINE BABY! Use it, love it, save the seeds and spread it.
Recipe: Chop chard and greens to chip sizes. Chop some of your beets into bite size coins or dice sized cubes. Crumble in some goat cheese, your fave nuts, a little olive oil, and a citrus squeeze. Eat voraciously or not at all.
Need some gardening advice? Post a question to the blog and we will try and answer it for you.
Enjoy the weather and get outside this week--Garden Guru Katz
I gained two more centers who are anxious to get gardens started; they are Jose Pedro and Settlemeier. The buzz about these gardens and the activities our children are doing with them has excited centers all over Oregon. My job is looking busier and busier as the gardens warm up and people warm up to the gardens. Yippee! The interesting aspect to these two new centers is that they lack ground space for food production. Each center at OCDC is individual and take on the terms of Head Start in creative ways. It takes time to analyze what would work best for each center. The centers lack gardening space but they will have some grand container gardens. I am great at container gardening. I hope to dot their outdoor space with massive containers full of food that is visually stunning. I hope to create an ornamental look with a food functionality. So...what plants will I be using. Well I will absolutely be using Swiss Chard because it is my favorite plant to grow right now. They might contain Kale, Fava Beans, Winter Peas, Parsley, Leeks, Cilantro, Carrots and Parsnips, cabbage, and broccoli. We will also be planting blueberries in containers. We hope to create a stable container garden practice for each center. I hope that this new garden style will be applicable to our home garden plots as well as our centers who similarly lack safe grounds for food producing. I hope to show our centers and the readers that space is not the biggest limiting factor for gardening among cost, access to water, creativity and time.
The new crop of kids has been fun. They are all sons and daughters of seasonal or migrant workers who have traveled to Oregon for our busy ag season. The ranges of skills and behaviours these children exhibit is wide so the classes have been a bit tougher. I am adapting the teaching style for these classes to be more camp based. There are crafts, story telling, harvesting, etc in shorter and easier to understand segments. This week we will pick a plant and draw it and write a few words about it on some paper. It will become a book of plants for each center to have made by the children and for the children. It will compromise a series of arts, observations, and literacy work for our children. My Spanish has been getting much better. I am able to understand a lot more of what my children mumble and have been able to communicate better with them and our teachers. I have been excited to use my Spanish in each class. I am looking forward to better weather and bigger crops. Good luck in your gardens and classes!
In the photos that precede this post you can see our children at Silverton harvesting some salad. They gave it to their kitchen to cook salad for them today! What a treat for all of us.
How does your garden grow?
TIME TO PROPAGATE YOUR TOMATOES: You like to pull of those "suckers" right? It makes your plant grow stouter and stronger right? Meh...maybe. Don't throw them in the compost. Take your suckers ( at least 2 inch long ones) and propagate them. With the soft start to our summer providing cloudy and humid days, you have got a great climate for producing some more plants. If you get em now, you might be able to pull off some more tomatoes or replace ones beat up by the rains.
Love Lupines: Need a beautiful native perennial that withstands lots of water and a bit of shade? Need one that fixes nitrogen to improve your soil and your plants health? Need one of the first plants to return from the blast zone of St. Helen's 20years ago? LUPINE BABY! Use it, love it, save the seeds and spread it.
Recipe: Chop chard and greens to chip sizes. Chop some of your beets into bite size coins or dice sized cubes. Crumble in some goat cheese, your fave nuts, a little olive oil, and a citrus squeeze. Eat voraciously or not at all.
Need some gardening advice? Post a question to the blog and we will try and answer it for you.
Enjoy the weather and get outside this week--Garden Guru Katz
Monday, June 7, 2010
Whether the Weather Will Change
It has been rainy. I am glad for the rain for our rivers and the fish in them, for our forests and the mushrooms in them, and our summer and the lack of rain in those days. Tomorrow will determine if this June is THE WETTEST IN OREGON HISTORY. We had 27 days of rain in April. The past 24 days have been wet as well which left us with 10 days of mixed sun/clouds in the past 2 months. So, how is everyone doing? Most people are bumming. Most of us have had just about enough. At least those cool crops are doing well.
The gardens are getting a beating but they are draining very well. We have had low temps and low light levels so most of the plants in our gardens seem dormant. We are fully planted for the summer season but we have not yet planted our squashes or pole beans. The slugs have been unrelenting. Our spring crops have been doing well. The radishes swelled and burst over the past month. They have been a delicious and exciting plant to harvest with the kids. We are always so surprised to see the bright red and white globes come out of the soil. They taste great and are even spicy. The beets, arugula, salads, and peas are doing wonderfully. I already have pods growing. The temps made our arugula GIANT size. I recently harvested almost 10 lbs of arugula and greens to make room for warmer season crops. I munched without using my hands while they were in the ground to make the kids laugh. They of course loved it and repeated it. It has been a trip watching the kids interact with the gardens. I don't mind that they grab, pull, munch, and bust up the garden. When I am there these are learning moments and I encourage the children to discover with their senses (to the shocked faces of my teachers). Exploring the boundaries of the garden is how the children START to interact with the space but they EVOLVE their actions with the garden to meet their own needs for discovery, play, and munch time. I don't like to say "Don't" at any time in the garden. I set up some ground rules (pun intended) that the kids follow. Be safe, Be respectful, Be responsible. Some side rules include Look, Listen, and Be Gentle. When I notice the kids tearing leaves we talk about leaves and how plants grow. How fast can you grow without your feet I ask them? How fast can you grow without food? I try and relate these happenings as they occur directly to our learning outcomes.
Look, I don't want a beautiful garden, I want a used garden. Once children begin to understand how the garden works and why it should be treated a certain way, they become my ambassadors. They begin to tell other kids how to behave and interact with the garden. I watched a kid last week pick and eat an entire bean sprout. Honestly, it looked pretty delicious (but I knew better). He thought he could eat it because I was allowing some students to eat salad like animals. What did he discover? Bitter, prickly flesh and soil chunks. I asked him if he liked it. He said no. I encouraged him to try and pick a different veggie to munch on based on his own way of identifying tasty. What did he pick? Pea sprouts. So I showed him how to harvest and munch on a pea sprout. What did he discover? Sweet, stringy, and crunchy. He even got to eat the flower! What a lost moment it would have been to tell him NO.
When it rains...get outside and play with mud. We are all familiar with mud here in the NorthWest. Mud is fun. We have made mud sculptures, mud houses, mud families. We recently read a story in Spanish titled This House is Made of Mud. It is a great story of a house in the Southwest desert that incorporates and invites nature in and the home out. The kids enjoyed the story. We then went outside and attempted to build some mud structures. It was so rainy though that I couldn't make the right consistency for the mud and it became a mucky squishy mess.
How does your garden grow?
Talk to your plants. They need some encouragement and some of your time. If you haven't been in your gardens (at least on a slug killing rampage) because of the rain then get out there and fool around with your plants. Now is a good time to weed and replant what has been decimated by climate or pest.
Wait Wait Wait to plant things like tomatoes, pole beans, squashes etc. They don't care that they have less days of light they just want nice temps to grow in. You will be surprised just how fast a tomato will grow to harvest size.
Take a hike. Spring mushrooms have had an bonus season this year due to our colder temps and rain. There has been white out conditions above 7500 feet in the mountains. That means we will have some SUPER blooms this summer for wild flowers because they haven't had time to peak at the sun yet.
Garden Guru Katz
The gardens are getting a beating but they are draining very well. We have had low temps and low light levels so most of the plants in our gardens seem dormant. We are fully planted for the summer season but we have not yet planted our squashes or pole beans. The slugs have been unrelenting. Our spring crops have been doing well. The radishes swelled and burst over the past month. They have been a delicious and exciting plant to harvest with the kids. We are always so surprised to see the bright red and white globes come out of the soil. They taste great and are even spicy. The beets, arugula, salads, and peas are doing wonderfully. I already have pods growing. The temps made our arugula GIANT size. I recently harvested almost 10 lbs of arugula and greens to make room for warmer season crops. I munched without using my hands while they were in the ground to make the kids laugh. They of course loved it and repeated it. It has been a trip watching the kids interact with the gardens. I don't mind that they grab, pull, munch, and bust up the garden. When I am there these are learning moments and I encourage the children to discover with their senses (to the shocked faces of my teachers). Exploring the boundaries of the garden is how the children START to interact with the space but they EVOLVE their actions with the garden to meet their own needs for discovery, play, and munch time. I don't like to say "Don't" at any time in the garden. I set up some ground rules (pun intended) that the kids follow. Be safe, Be respectful, Be responsible. Some side rules include Look, Listen, and Be Gentle. When I notice the kids tearing leaves we talk about leaves and how plants grow. How fast can you grow without your feet I ask them? How fast can you grow without food? I try and relate these happenings as they occur directly to our learning outcomes.
Look, I don't want a beautiful garden, I want a used garden. Once children begin to understand how the garden works and why it should be treated a certain way, they become my ambassadors. They begin to tell other kids how to behave and interact with the garden. I watched a kid last week pick and eat an entire bean sprout. Honestly, it looked pretty delicious (but I knew better). He thought he could eat it because I was allowing some students to eat salad like animals. What did he discover? Bitter, prickly flesh and soil chunks. I asked him if he liked it. He said no. I encouraged him to try and pick a different veggie to munch on based on his own way of identifying tasty. What did he pick? Pea sprouts. So I showed him how to harvest and munch on a pea sprout. What did he discover? Sweet, stringy, and crunchy. He even got to eat the flower! What a lost moment it would have been to tell him NO.
When it rains...get outside and play with mud. We are all familiar with mud here in the NorthWest. Mud is fun. We have made mud sculptures, mud houses, mud families. We recently read a story in Spanish titled This House is Made of Mud. It is a great story of a house in the Southwest desert that incorporates and invites nature in and the home out. The kids enjoyed the story. We then went outside and attempted to build some mud structures. It was so rainy though that I couldn't make the right consistency for the mud and it became a mucky squishy mess.
How does your garden grow?
Talk to your plants. They need some encouragement and some of your time. If you haven't been in your gardens (at least on a slug killing rampage) because of the rain then get out there and fool around with your plants. Now is a good time to weed and replant what has been decimated by climate or pest.
Wait Wait Wait to plant things like tomatoes, pole beans, squashes etc. They don't care that they have less days of light they just want nice temps to grow in. You will be surprised just how fast a tomato will grow to harvest size.
Take a hike. Spring mushrooms have had an bonus season this year due to our colder temps and rain. There has been white out conditions above 7500 feet in the mountains. That means we will have some SUPER blooms this summer for wild flowers because they haven't had time to peak at the sun yet.
Garden Guru Katz
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