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….
