Out of the Wilderness, a Garden

A student garden at Olin is something I (Gaby '15) personally have been wanting be part of since I started at Olin.   For the past few years I have been attending the Campus Cultivation Conference, a Boston area event for students involved in running small farm collectives.  This year especially, David '15 and I were extremely jealous when hearing about all the amazing farms students from Tufts, Middlebury, Wellesley, BU, and others were working on at their respective colleges. We decided were ready for one of our own, and this was the summer to do it.

Boris working on some sod

Em digging out a big rock

Thus, this Past Saturday the Olin Secret Garden was born.  We spent the morning seeding trays of broccoli, cabbage, beans, corn, hot pepper, pac choy, oregano, thyme and basil.  Once our suite window was full of seed trays scrounged from cardboard boxes and egg cartons, we went outside.  We had scouted out an area in Parcel B (the woods next to Olin's main campus) the previous evening and chose a spot with good drainage and humus-y soil that was not too sandy.  We used a large pick, a hoe and a shovel to rid a small area about 7 x 15 feet of thick sod.  This was not an easy task- it took David, Boris '12 and I all morning and most of the afternoon to dig up all of the sod.  After all, before we came the area was packed with of knee-high perennial grasses that have been growing there for a long time.

Boris doing some hoeing and Victoria working on the fence

David and Em with a roll of sod

We went through different methods, but found the best way to pull up sod was to loosen it with the shovel or the pick and then peel the sod back with our hands.  We were joined by Em (Wellesley '14) and Victoria '15 for part of the day as well.  Ben Linder, an Olin Professor who does beekeeping in Parcel B, stopped by and checked out the garden while we were working.  He even donated some fencing he had lying around which we constructed around the garden.  Lastly, we laid down cardboard as mulch to stop the weeds and called it a day.

Me (Gaby) wearing a sod wig!

Victory!

We took Sunday off and did other things, but today we were back to work.  Our first seed sprouted this morning (Kale) and by this evening there were over 2 dozen sprouts of Kale and Pak Choy.  I was not happy with the amount of light the plants were getting on our windowsill so I moved them outside around 11am and they got to sit outside in beautiful weather for the rest of the day.  Overnight they are living on a table in the East Hall 1st floor team room but I will move them back outside tomorrow morning.

First Sprout!!!!!

Seeds in our window

Loading up Compost

Today there was a major afternoon thunderstorm, but that did not stop our plans to go to Regeneration Plot (Wellesley College's student garden) to pick up compost.  Our friend Rebecca (Wellesley '13) who is the farm manager at Regeneration graciously let us have some of their compost for The Secret Garden.  This was done by shoveling compost into blue bins and loading them into my compact Prius. We were able to borrow blue bins from friends at Olin, which worked very well except for the fact that filling them all the way meant they were too heavy for me to lift!  Once the compost is deposited into the garden tomorrow we will be able to direct seed some more plants.

Seed trays in the window of our suite