Houston High and the Great Potato Project Part III - The Whole Garden Comes Together!

We have begun our second summer of working on the HHS Garden Project and this year we are taking it over the top!  We received a grant from the State of Alaska, Department of Agriculture, in the Farm to School program (  http://dnr.alaska.gov/ag/ag_FTS.htm for more information) to enable us to expand the garden and get some of the tools and soil amendments we need to be really productive!  Part of our grant conditions are that we had to have the kids design the garden and help plant it.  This year we have been much more successful at getting the kids involved.  Some of the reasons for that are that it didn't snow the day before school got out and we have some really engaged staff members who are keeping things going as well as some really engaged students who thought garden design might be fun!  Our garden design most closely follows the plan designed by Michael Riffelmacher, a Sophomore at HHS.  His design was very clear, concise, and gave expansion options that will work over time as we expand throughout the years.  We had 7 students who did garden designs and all of them were fantastic!  I hope they all take their designs and make them happen.  

Mrs. Albertson is one of our fantastic staff members who have committed to helping the garden grow!  The group is meeting each Tuesday from 1-4:00 pm at the High School Garden and things are growing great.  The classroom students were able to get all of the potato bins planted before school got out.  This year we have pallet bins, upcycled tire bins, and also some rectangular bins made by the Culinary Arts instructor Mat Bredburg out of scrap wood.  

The above picture shows one of the scrap wood bins and our Zuchinni plants.  We are starting out with just the two for this summer and see how we do.  The plants were obtained from the MYHouse MY City Market which is a Non Profit working with homeless and at risk youth to give them job and life skills. (http://myhousematsuhomelessyouthcenter.com/) They have begun a greenhouse that is community supported and their greenhouse projects makes a great partner for our garden project.

We posted an informational sheet to let passers-by know what we have going on and hopefully keep the dogs out of the garden!

 Above and below, we used on of the scrap wood bins for Rainbow Blend carrots.  The kids love it at harvest time when the multi-colored carrots are harvested and can be made into wonderful snacks or eaten as a snack themselves!

Above right, Christy Hammond shovels more soil onto the potatoes that have grown up enough to need burying.

Another project we have begun at the garden is the Hugelkultur bed shown above.  Hugelkultur is the process of  using waste material, sticks, logs, twigs, grass clippings, etc to build a no-till raised bed that will feed itself through the years with the disintegration (composting) of the materials used to build it.  We will be using this one for strawberries and building another one at a later time to use for raspberries.  This is a learning experience for most of our group as they have not seen nor built Hugelkultur before.  It expands the knowledge base for all of us and is a good example for the kids that they can use what they have where they are.  Please see http://www.inspirationgreen.com/hugelkultur.html for more information.  There are also many YouTube videos regarding this concept as well.

 

 Above left, I am mixing soil from the giant dirt hill behind me with soil amendments.  Our soil came from underneath the football field and is nutrient poor and very compacted.  It is a clay/sand mix that needs peat, vermiculite and other amendments for it to be a good growing medium  Above right, two of our students pull trees along the fence line to prepare for the tomato tires and the mixed soil storage area.

 The mosquitoes were fierce the day we were working out here, and we had more dirt in our hair from swatting them than we had in some of the bins!

 We started with two sets of two tires and two well established Sungold tomatoes that had been hardened out for about two weeks in the wind and rain here at Wicked Raven Farm.

 

 We mixed our soil and planted the tomatoes low in the tire.  You can bury tomatoes deep and they make more roots.  We chose to bury ours deep so that we would have lots of root base and maintain our good upright habit of this indeterminate tomato variety.   See the blog at  http://wickedraven.blogspot.com/2012_09_01_archive.htmlee for more information about this wonderful variety of yummy tomato!

The finished planting of the Sungold.

 Left, one of our sets of tires has potatoes planted in it.  These ones have been re-buried a few times already.
To the right is one of the scrap wood bins with potatoes in it and these are ready to be buried again. That will be on our list for the next garden day.

Our good old original pallet bins with potatoes in them.  These have been buried once already and are almost ready for the next bury.  

Stay tuned as I will be posting updates and posting some of the pictures of the kids doing the planting (I can't find the darn things today but they are awesome)!  Ill also try to upload some of the handouts we have been using to help this fun and educational project go forward!

Winters loss is a Summers Gain!

This past winter we had a couple of items that didn't make it into the storage shed and were lost to the elements!  The bearings on the riding mower, a plastic watering can, and my favorite watering can of all time, this little galvanized beauty!  It was still full of water when it froze solid and busted out the side!

You can see in the above photo how the bottom is rounded - not supposed to be- and what you cant see that is also not supposed to be is a large crack between the bottom of the can and the walls!  It won't hold water at all!  So I did what any self respecting gardener would do to honor her favorite watering can's demise as a watering can - I up-cycled it into a great planter!

I started by putting a little gravel for drainage in the bottom of the can.

Then I filled it with good soil to the top.  Pack it in a little so it doesn't sink so far that your plants can't be seen over the top of the can.  Put your favorite flower seeds in and water it well.

You end up with a wonderful little planter watering can that will last for almost ever!  I planted mine with Nasturtiums as they are edible, beautiful and add a great pop of color in this corner where the driveway meets the house and I have all of my kitchen herbs that don't usually have flowers on them.

Once the flowers are gone and the seed pods have formed, dry them out and use them for croutons!  They make a peppery, crunchy crouton that are wonderful on salads or as topping with panko for your mac n cheese!  You can also use the pods fresh to add a peppery pop to your fresh greens, or pickle them and use like capers!  Ill post some pictures of that this fall so you can see them.

What did you lose over the winter that became something great for the summer?  I hope it makes up for the loss as my little watering can planter did!  Enjoy the summer!

Enter the Greenhouse - up cycling the entries

Summertime has come early to Alaska and because I have a personal rule about not planting anything out before Memorial Day Weekend, it has enabled me to finish two projects that were started last year.  One I actually finished last fall but didn't get to finish the up-cycle on the left overs!  The concrete slab under my front stairs had been in a sad state of deterioration for a couple of years.  Pitted, crumbling, and looking terrible as well as being too small for the space that it should have taken up, I decided to make a new front porch patio with red square bricks.  I started by loosening the concrete slab part under the stairs and leveling the gravel for the bricks as best I could with the slab still in place.  It was part of the system to hold up the stairs after all!  You can't see it in the photo below but the gray slab portion is cracked all the way across.

Below is the lovely finished product patio!  I love how it turned out and should it deteriorate I can replace just one brink and have an easier time.  The slab was about 4 inches thick and weighed about as much as a dump truck I'm sure!

This is the two (plus) pieces of the slab that came out of the area near the stairs.  I moved them over by the green house with the intention of up-cycling them as part of the greenhouse entry way which I have been struggling with.

Above you can see how the pieces of the current green house entry have not been fitting together and my gravel is all over the place and the plastic wont stay where it belongs and its a hot mess!

It also makes it sort of a trip-up area for me as the surfaces are pretty uneven and it's an area that really gets used a lot.

I scraped back the gravel and plastic onto the current patio area which I am keeping - these are blue board slabs with 1/2" of concrete on top.  It is the same thing I have inside the greenhouse as a floor.  It works really well to keep the frost heaves down and to hold the heat once it is warm.  I dug out the gravel and sand underneath just so the sections of slab would fit in.  I did have to juggle carefully the fuel line to the oil barrel which sits near the greenhouse and had to go under the slab sections.

I did replace the plastic underneath and the pea gravel around it and I am really happy with the outcome.  It also filled in a low spot that was really bothersome on the path to the greenhouse and back.  I will be filling the crack between the slabs with some thyme so it smells good when you walk on it.  Yum!

  

Even Ripley the little rescue dog loves the area now!  Cool and shady on this side of the greenhouse and now nice and neat, and made use of some old concrete in a new spot!

Mothers Day and the Clean Bathroom!

I have two sons - and a husband.  Not long ago one of my youngest posted a cartoon on my wall on facebook which of course I cannot find now; but it went something like this - two rolls of toilet paper being pulled either from the top or the bottom of the roll - and it said "the argument" and then below it was a roll of toilet paper not on a roll and that said "the reality"! It really is the reality at my house!  The boys cannot seem to get it that the toilet paper needs to go on the roll - not because the paper works better or rolls off easier - which it does but because IT LOOKS NICER!

When my oldest went out of state to play Juniors hockey, I did a little training with him so he would know how to put the paper on the roll - little training session during which he said "Mom, I KNOW how to do this!"  You do?  Then how come I am the only one who can seem to do it here in this house?  How do I know you can do it if you never have and you live here!  To which he replied "Yah - but it would be embarrassing to not do it when I'm a guest in someone's house!"  I made him practice it a few times to make sure he really did know how!

It also never fails that when I put the organic bowl cleaner in the bowl to clean the toilet, one of the boys goes in and uses the toilet, flushing all my pre soak away!

So today on Mothers day I hatched a plan to keep the bathroom clean and all to myself with the paper on the roll!  We have two bathrooms - they still had one to use:

 I hung this on the bathroom door, put the paper on the roll and the bowl cleaner in the bowl, wiped down the counters and then cleaned the bowl.  The boys avoided me/it like the plague!  There was something wrong with one of the bathrooms!  Stay away from it! Use the other one!

Throughout the day I would come in and use the bathroom, closing the door after so it would always seem to still be broken or "out of order".  Really it was "in order" and it stayed that way for the whole day!  Lovely!

At the end of the day when I was ready, I removed the sign and let the boys in!  My husband did ask what was wrong with the bathroom - of course after I took the sign down!  When he asked me I asked him why he didnt ask when I put the sign up and he said "if something was really wrong you would have told me, and I kinda didn't really want to know!"

My other bathroom was trashed and of course there was no toilet paper on the roll!

I really did have a great Mother's Day and I hope that you all did too!