Mission Statement

To foster an increased awareness of the local and global interconnections associated with food production and consumption by directly linking the Mount Holyoke College Community to the Garden through academics, the campus dining experience, and student volunteer work. The Mount Holyoke Student Garden will also build connections and share knowledge with the agricultural community of the Pioneer Valley, thereby strengthening Mount Holyoke's relationship to the local environment.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Same Place, New Faces!

The 2013 gardening season has started and we've already been hard at work! We are Kayla Smith '16, Katie Block '15, and Madeleine Wojack '15. Now that school is out and summer is here, we've been dedicating our time towards cleaning up the garden, the shed, and planting the seeds in the greenhouse! We got a bit of a late start with seeding because it took a while to find our third garden manager.

As you can see, the trellises in the garden are in need of repair from standing outside all winter. The grass (and weeds) are high and the garden needs to be tilled!

We moved the trellises out of the way so the plots can be tilled. You can still see where the plots were! Its where the grass changes color. 

We cleaned out the shed on 5/16 and trashed anything that wasn't useful. We took note of all of the materials we had left (in case you were wondering, which we know you weren't, we found a lot of fox pee. Both dried and liquid! Aren't we lucky? By the way, fox and coyote urine is used to keep away rabbits. You think rabbits are cute and fluffy now but they are a garden's worst enemy)

Katie found some questionable items....

As for what we have decided to grow, we've got quite the collection: tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, beans, peas, squash, corn, onions and cucumbers. Those are only for the ecology plots! For our personal gardens, we've got an assortment of different items including sunflowers, poppies, hot peppers, snapdragons, bok choi  and different herbs. That which could be seeded indoors, we planted in the greenhouse on 5/14 right after we met with Nora, the manager for the South Hadley Farmer's Market. 

We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but we're excited to see what we can do!


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there! I'm Allison, one of the interns from last year!! All looks so great from the pics!

You mentioned the fox pee that you found - that helped SO MUCh with the rabbits! What also helped was the rabbit repelling solution we bought (I think there's still around a gallon of it left!) that has hot peppers and garlic, among other organic things, as ingredients. Spraying a water-diluted solution on the veggies, especially the lettuce, helped us a LOT with the bunny problems we were having.

That solution can easily be made from local ingredients, too, if you don't feel like using the store-bought kind. You can look up recipes/proportions, but usually some cloves of garlic and a few hot peppers steeped in a gallon of water, and then sprayed on the plants, should suffice!

Anyway, good luck! If you feel like geting in touch feel free to hit me up @ fishe24a@mtholyoke.edu Peace!

May 28, 2013 at 2:12 PM

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