Logicgardenblog's Blog

I have had a hard time keeping up with this blog, it has been a very busy season for us.  However, I will attempt to fill this in a bit.  We learned a lot this semester. Learned which ways are best for us to plant in the field, transplants for sure.  Direct seeded three times with little luck, so spent the rest of the season filling in the gaps with transplants.  We learned that selling our produce is the best way for us to make money.  We have made two sales to the dining halls now.  We still have a lot of seeds that dining has bought for us, so until those are gone we will have to continue to give it away.  But someday that will stop hopefully.  We started on the permaculture demonstration site.  We dug swales and began sheet mulching the site.  We learned how to look around at our resources and use what is at hand.  We learned that you can plan tomatoes so close in the high tunnel, and when you pull them up watch out for Black Widow!!  I could go on and on, but that will all be written in our end of the season report which we start on tomorrow.  I had two interns this semester, Sarah and Mike.  Sarah and I worked together on Monday and Wednesday, it is nice having two ladies out there.  It seems that many of the new growers that are coming around are women, which is interesting to me.  Mike worked primarily on the Permaculture site, doing a lot of reading and research in order to get him up to speed on what Permaculture is about and why we are doing things the way we are.  Next semester, he will help me with the plan and putting everything in.  I am kind of prepping him to be the one that knows what is going on (at the Permaculture site), should I happen to not be around next year.  I have been working on my thesis and giving presentations about LOGIC.  Our project and group always gets a high amount of praise and questions from other people, and I hope that after my job is over they will be able to figure out how to keep a management position open for someone.  We are having two end of the year workshops, one last week on Permaculture, given by the Southern Illinois Permaculture Guru, Wayne Weisman.  And this week, Dayna Conner is giving one on planning your biointensive garden.  I hope with this that people will learn something and take the initiative to begin their own gardens.  It has been said that All the world’s problems could be solved in a garden, and sometimes I believe that….

So it has been a very long time since I have updated this thing.  The summer was long and hot.  But we made it through.  We harvested tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil from the high tunnel.  It was a great learning experience working out there over the summer, and once again I gained tremendous respect for the farmers who have been doing this work for many years in the Southern Illinois heat.  The Agriculture students and I formed a bond over the summer and without as many classes to keep us busy, the center out there is beginning to look like an actual work space.  We got some money given to us and now have all the tools we need for the season and got our own seeds.  This will allow us to sell our produce to the kitchens and make some money!  The permaculture site is coming along.  It is going to be very cool.  The man helping me with it, Wayne Weisman, has agreed to do an info session for all those interested it.  Permaculture is a lesser known technique of growing food but I feel a very promising one and I am happy that we will be able to being putting together a demonstration site.  We went up to the University of Illinois at Champaign and gave a talk about our project, which was very well received.  Then we toured their garden.  They have more acreage to work with, but I felt lucky for our set up because we have a building to escape from the cold, heat, and rain.  I feel this project is growing and gaining momentum and with the right people falling into it will continue to do good things and provide many opportunities for SIUC students and the larger community.  More to come later….

Our lovely hoophouse is glowing.  After all the problems I had with it, it turned out to be just fine.  Our lettuce and spinach should be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks.  Then to double digging.  Then to tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers, corn, squash, good stuff.  Gardening is good.

Well, well, well…. our little lettuce and spinach plants finally decided to show their pretty little heads.  I was getting worried.  However, it seems we will have the rows filled up.  The ones we planted in November are almost ready to harvest.  The green fund proposals got turned in.  It is kind of a turning point for LOGIC at the moment, because we could get a whole lot more resources or not much at all…  We’ll see what we have in store for us.  In any case, I am happy the seeds we planted germinated.  Next week we’ll be getting the outside beds ready for planting.  Gardens are awesome.  More people should have them.

Spring is coming in, and with it the rain.  It’s ok with me however, I like the rain.  And I am definitely ready for spring.  The garden is coming along, I am getting anxious for things to start moving.  The hoophouse is good, I am learning more and more each day.  By the time I figure it out, it will be time for me to move on.  Such is life I guess.  The Vermi building is looking a lot different these days.  The old compost is almost all gone, one more work day and we should have it cleaned up.  There are plans to make the building into an actual work space instead of a storage facility.  That will be good.  It always helps to feel you have a functional space to back up your projects.  The food forest design is coming along.  The more I read, the more I figure out I how much I have to learn.  That is like everything though.  The proposal is due Friday and then Spring Break.  Half the semester is over already.  It’s crazy how fast time seems to go when you are in school.  I feel like I spend all my time waiting for the semester to be over.  That’s bad I know, but who doesn’t really.  Well, things will start picking up here soon.  It is going to be a wet spring I have a feeling, but we will be harvesting the carrots soon and planting our outside garden.   More to come…

Last weekend we planted romaine and spinach in the hoophouse.  The ones we planted back in November are coming up and starting to grow again.  They are quite pretty.  It’s staying pretty warm in there, an average of about 50.  It has not been so cold and we actually got some rain which watered our carrots really well one last time before we’ll dig them up in a few weeks.  They got quite a bit bigger over the winter so I guess you can overwinter carrots!  We had planted those back in October I belive.  The Permaculture class I am taking is awesome.  I am in the works of putting together a plan for a small food forest demonstration site.  It’s going to be really neat.  Hopefully the Sustainability Council will approve our Green Fund proposal and we can get to work on it.  LOGIC is growing by leaps and bounds.  It seems everyone wants to be involved.  It’s really great.  This weekend we are planning on getting rid of all the old compost in the Vermi building, by that I mean sifting it so it can be spread on the field in the spring.  It really needs to happen, then the facility will be much better set up for some serious composting action.  Well, there are other things to be done.  I’ll keep this updated.  Peace in the mid east.

The garden is moving along.  While nothing more has gotten planted, we have in the works a compost sifting party which is something that has been needing to happen for a while.  Working with the Agriculture department at school, we are going to sift through all the old compost in the Vermi building, harvest everything in the standing bin, and put it in the hoophouse and on the field.  Then the vermi building will be starting over somewhat.  The hoophouse is in dire need of organic matter and compost so it will be very good for that as well.  We also have seeds ordered for the spring and summer gardens and plans for both as well.  Working with April, the girl who runs the Vermi building at the moment, is proving to be quite rewarding as she has been able to give me a lot of resources and information that I need.  I think a collaborative effort will be beneficial for everyone involved.  I am looking forward to seeing how the semester turns out.

Every day I work on this garden I gain more respect for organic farmers.  This stuff is not easy.  Putting together the plan is so much more complex than I had anticipated.  It becomes even more complex when I begin to worry that the crops won’t do well or we have not prepared the soil well enough.  I guess it is like life.  You do the best to prepare yourself for what is coming next, but no matter the time and amount of planning and work you put into it- things will still happen that you hadn’t planned for or anticipated.  I guess these are the joys and sorrows of it however, and each day I am realizing what a great learning experience this is.  Even if nothing grows (AHHHH!!!!) I still will walk away with so much knowledge and even more respect for the natural cycles of the earth and how much care we must give her.  I also will always be reminded how easy it is to go to the store and fill up your cart with organic produce and then get to the line to find out it how expensive it all is and complain.  However now instead of complaining I will give thanks to the farmers for their sweat, blood, courage, and knowledge.

Today some work got done, via the computer, on the planning for the spring and summer for the garden.  I believe this semester will be a good one for LOGIC and I hope that many more people get interested in the group and what we are doing.  The break was nice, and now we are around a week and a half away from classes starting up again.  A good planning session at the beginning of the semester will hopefully start us out on the right track.  More officer meetings will be taking place this semester as well in order to better organize the garden and allow more people to have a say in what goes on.  It will also hopefully open up more creative ideas so that we can expand what we are doing and reach out to more people.  Well, its late and I need to go home.  More later.

Man, it has been a cold few days.  The hoophouse stays warm when the sun is out, but the lovely overcast winters of the Midwest have been keeping it quite frosty.  The plants are small and we’ll see if they get much bigger.  We’re devising a plan to keep them warmer. 

The rest of the beets were harvested.  Almost a 100 lbs of food.  Not a lot of people like beets, and so perhaps this was not the best crop to grow ~~ however it proved we could do it and next time we’ll grow something a bit more conventional.  The rotation is what is going to kill us however, because we don’t have much space therefore we have to keep a large variety of crops moving in and out of the area in order to keep our 2 or 3 year rotation plan going.  We’ll get it though.

The end of the semester is rapidly approaching and I am quite relieved.  I hope that the next one is smooth and much good work gets done.  More to come later ~~~