A New Growing Season

Another summer means another growing season and new garden managers at the Mount Holyoke student garden!  Shristi, Lobsang (the "b" is silent!), and I (Allison) will be tending to the garden with care and (definitely) a little sillyness as the summer goes on.

It's only the second week of May but the trees in the Valley are in full bloom, everything is lush and green, and with all the rain we've been getting the past few days, it looks like we'll have a very green June.

We've been working on the garden since mid-April this year, taking a bit of time each week to do small maintenance projects and learn a little about what we'll do as managers.  Now that it's summer, however, we'll be spending so much time up there, working the soil to get the growing process underway.  We've got a ton of maintenance to do - the fence needs fixing, the plot needs tilling, soil has to be amended with compost and fertilizers (organic, of course!), trellises need to be restrung - the list goes on!  Just today we sowed our first seeds in the Talcott Greenhouse with some help from Russ and other employees and we can't wait to get everything going to grow some Crops for a Closer Community :)

With that, here are some photos of the seeding and clean-up on at MHC!

Shristi and Lobsang prepping some trays for sowing.

Lettuce seeds are TINY!  One every 1/4"..precision precision!

Me (Allison) prepping a flat for watering.

The trays of veggies we chose to sow beforehand.

Shristi soaking a tray, thanks to Russ' recommendation!

       

"LET ME OUT!!"..things are getting silly up here.

The fence is DEFINITELY in need of repair!

Student experiment plots: before.

Mount Holyoke research plots: before.  So much rye!

Six trellises like this one need to be restrung!

Peace,

Allison