Expansion and Corn!

      Often I think that I can judge how good my day has been by how dirty I got, and by that metric, this past Saturday was a fantastic day. We spent several hours in the varying degrees of sunlight cutting down grass, ripping up sod, and spreading mulch and fertilizer. We had a few more hands this work day, with Jennifer, Colby, and Anna all coming out to help. 

      First of all, we got corn! Despite our starting the plants late in the season and having very few plants (usually you need more than 14ish corn plants to get good pollination), we've now harvested a total of 17 ears of corn! We are quite pleasantly surprised to have a nice sweet, starchy treat to cook up now. They're going to get cooked up shortly!







      And now for the rest of the post:

      We started our day off by going to a horse farm in Framingham that had advertised free horse manure on craigslist. This was just what we needed, so Gaby and I hopped into Eva, my '97 sedan, with all sorts of plastic bins to go shovel poop.

This is about what ours looked like, though the farm owner offered us some fresher stuff...

      We drove around behind their barn and started shoveling this hot (literally steaming) organic matter into our bins. Surprisingly enough (to people who haven't been around horse farms), it doesn't smell bad at all. Just smells like old hay. How convenient!

The morning crew!

      Work went by faster this time than the first creation. Partly because of having more hands out there working, partly because we had more tools with us (my favorite is still the pick, clearly the most fun of all the tools), partly because now we've done it before! 

      The sod was drier than the spring though, and it made a difference. When we first started the garden, we were able to roll up large sections of sod (see Gaby's sod-wig in the first blog entry), but this time the sod came up in smaller clumps. It was breaking up much more. This was also probably due to the plants growing on this section. This new section had many more reedy plants (the yellow flowering ones in the background of the group photo) which had sparser root structures. They didn't form as much of a mat as the grasses did. 

Anna and the freshly place manure.

      The next step was cardboard, used as mulch. It took a few trips back and forth from the trash rooms in the dorms, but we soon got enough cardboard to cover the new plot with one layer of cardboard everywhere.

Gaby setting up the fence

      Once we had the cardboard down, laying down the manure was pretty quick and easy. Luckily we had enough for a thin layer over everything with our one load from the horse farm. We'll be looking to get some more dirt and compost to put on top.

The new, expanded garden is complete!

      One thing we weren't expecting was the number of big rocks we had to dig up. Last time there were a lot of rocks, but they were mostly small, like the size that you see around the edge of our fence (holding down the lip so that digging critters don't get in - we've had no trouble with rabbits so far!). Maybe one or two big ones.

      But in this lot there were several huge rocks. These guys were quite heavy and took some grit to dislodge. We had enough to make a small cairn (see photo below). Hopefully we'll figure out a good use for them!

      It was a good day, and it's always good to get back after a day of sweaty work and know that you made something concrete and good. We've changed a tiny little piece of the world for the better. 

First Harvest

As I was driving back to Olin yesterday after being away for the last month, I received a text from Mary describing the abundance of the garden.  It was the best news to receive! Naturally, the first place I went after arriving on campus was the garden.

We are both happy to report that the garden is thriving! We were able to harvest over a pound of beans yesterday, as well as our first few kale leaves and basil sprigs.  The corn ears are developing nicely, which is lucky given how few plants we have and their pollination needs.  It seems we got some help from the bees (thanks, Ben Linder)!

An equal success were the relatively few weeds that we had in the garden.  Our cardboard mulch was a huge success!  After a month of no tending, Mary and I were able to fully weed the garden in about 3 minutes.

We are looking forward to harvesting more of everything and planting spinach in the garden once the beans are done.  We have also discussed doubling the size of the garden this fall and adding a bench to the area.  Most of all, we are excited to share the Secret Garden with the Olin community and really build a core group of people dedicated to maintaining and growing it.  We have already heard from a few interested folks and we will hopefully connect with them soon when we get organized.

Finding Bean Plants!

BEANSSSS

Corn ears, getting bigger!

Cabbage and Kale!

Mary with our harvest!