Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Office Hours


Hey Everyone!

So, starting this week I'll be leading "office hours" on Thursdays from 9 to 9:45. There are a group of young high school boys from Wayside who will joining me to water, mulch, weed, and harvest. If you're free, stop by and help out too!

Also, if you'd like to hold your own office hours at another time of the week, please let me know!

Emilie

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Summer Bounty



The Garden is doing BEAUTIFULLY this summer, as you can see from this picture. Everything is lush, and green, and growing spectacularly. All those melon and basil plants we were worrying about when we first transplanted them seem to have recovered completely, thankfully!

Amy and I have been harvesting sugar snap and snow peas galore, and we even harvested the VERY FIRST zucchini of the season! See the picture of our beautiful yellow squash below?

We've also had great help from the Environmental Justice JBS students, who help me weed and water. They also managed to dig a big trench (no small feat if you recall the amount of rocks and boulders in our soil!) for some of our new perennials, such as the strawberry plant donated by Parker's parents, and the Nanking Cherry bush donated by Judy. Thank you!


I'll be keeping you updated weekly from now on all the new events, so make sure to subscribe!

Can't wait to see you all in the fall!

~Emilie

P.S: A little quote from Walden, since I have been reading lots of Thoreau lately:
"Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, (...) but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, (...) I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; (...)" Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans."