A Cooperative Learning Project
Last week I found the first tomato hornworm of the season! Last year they were a big problem- they grow insanely large and can quickly decimate the leaves of a tomato plant. This one is just a baby, and looks just like an inchworm except for the horn.
Arlington Climate Change Week – July 16-24
A week of activities, learning and service dedicated to the climate
http://www.sustainablearlington.org/sa15/
Vision 2020 Sustainable Arlington and A Better Future Project invite the public to a series of climate events during the week of July 16 to July 24. This event is co-sponsored by Mystic River Watershed Association (http://mysticriver.org/).
The Robbins Farm Garden is a learning resource, but we’re sometimes asked how the learning actually works. This is how – on a typical nice gardening day, we’re visited by a continuous stream of other park users, often families with young children who walk down from the playground. We give tours, talk about what’s growing, how we plant, what we plant, how we manage problems, and we hand out samples.
Wow, potatoes grow underground?
While listening to Michael Pollan’s "The Omnivore’s Dilemma", we were reminded of the contributions of Sir Albert Howard, the "father of composting", and a pioneer of organic gardening methods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Howard
His 1940 book "An Agricultural Testament" on soil conditioning and particularly composting is online here:
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/howardAT/ATtoc.html
"From the point of view of farming the towns have become parasites. They will last under the present system only as long as the earth’s fertility lasts. Then the whole fabric of our civilization must collapse."
I opened up the garden today to entertain quite a number of visitors. Three adults were much impressed with our potato plantation, never having seen blossoming potatoes!
We’re educational for adults as well as children. I wish I’d had a camera for a sturdy 3-year-old fingering a squash leaf attended by a smaller one looking on. I fed the two some peas from a pod, and when the mother asked the 3-year-old to say "thank you," he said "more" instead.
Two other older children, Korean, decided to keep the peas to plant them as their peas hadn’t come up.
I opened up the garden for an hour-plus. I fixed our sign and banner so it says 2011 (what I’d fixed before came off somehow).
Quite a few families visited, and I conversed quite pleasantly with someone who had just started a garden in his yard. I suggested that not much can be done with the flea beetle eating his cabbage, but thought it wouldn’t really hurt it that much.
I went along, more or less, with someone who asked why her pumpkin seedling turned yellow; too much water, she thought.
I gave three active boys glasses of water.
I tried to draw the “three-sisters” plot, but succeeded only in re-enforcing my admiration for Realist painters and my understanding why everyone changed to Impressionism!