Bits And Pieces

So much is happening in the Garden that it's hard to keep up. Here's a quick look.

Tony of Tony's Embroidery, poses with the Teen Interns. This t-shirt was designed by Morgan, one of the teen interns, and Tony has been our t-shirt printer. Looking sharp!

Power School students come to the garden to plant herbs, veggies, and flowers using the companion planting theme. The idea of companion planting is that plants benefit and support each other by attracting good bugs, trapping bad bugs, and building soil nutrients through plant chemistry.

Garden Day Campers continue to produce works of art using plant parts and paints. In the Art In The Garden week of day camp students will produce an art show for their parents on the last day.

Although the plants declined to be photographed as they got on their groove, these teen interns and one of the day campers showed no shyness. Being in the Garden just makes ya rock out. Tootitata tootitata tata!

There are two more weeks of Garden Day Camp. August 2-5 the theme is "Garden Gurus: Gardening Know-how from A to Z", and August 9-12 the theme is "Garden Detectives". For more information, go to Classes and Events, and then click on "Summer Camp Details" for specific information.

As the Garden grows and blossoms, there are also many opportunities to become a "Friend of the Garden", i.e., to volunteer. All sorts of help is needed from taking pictures for the blog, helping with "friendraisers", watering, weeding, planting, produce picking, and etc. If you are interested in becoming involved in this community effort, please email Judy Hess at friendsofthegarden@yahoo.com.

Welcome MACSA!

Day campers leave and MACSA students arrive to become garden-wise. Led by Garden Director and guru, Judy Hess, students tour the vegetable beds.

One of this week's lessons was to learn about our friendly worms and how they make wonderful nutrients for the garden. The worms digest food scraps and other edible materials such as newspaper. Students learn worm anatomy while actually digging into the worm bin and finding the sometimes elusive creatures.

Students are also introduced to the recycling of old vegetation and food scraps, known as "composting".

Parents taste camper creations

In the finalé to week one of the Garden's sentinel garden day camp, the parents were invited to partake in an organic meal and see what their children had made. Once again this blogger was right on time to get a few tastes of the fixings from the Garden and other healthy offerings. Main course was a salad with greens picked only minutes before from the lettuce bed, and salad dressing freshly made with herbs from the herb beds, topped with unsalted sunflower seeds. Dessert was a plain cone filled with a mixture of fruit pieces bound together with real yogurt. As an appetizer, there were fresh apricot halves filled with yogurt and topped with a walnut piece. During the week campers practiced preparing the recipes and made a recipe book to take home so their families could reproduce these garden pleasures in the future. Campers also planted herbs and flowers in the kids' garden bed.

In Week 2 of Garden Day Camp, participants will learn about good and bad bugs, pollinators and how to attract them, make natural repellents, and do many more fun activities. See ya there!

Summer Camp is Yummy!

Five weeks of summer Garden Day Camp have begun! Each week follows a different theme using the garden and nature as the basis.

Day 1 of this week's "Chefs in the Garden" theme included exploration of plants and their seeds, the creation of two different dips using herbs freshly picked from the garden's herb bed, the beginnings of take-home recipe books, planting a sunflower seed to grow at home, and many other activities that had students minds and bodies fully engaged.

Taught by Katie Hogan and Judy Hess, with help from their newly trained teen interns, this camp rocks.

Personally I found it hard to pull myself away, and managed not to until I was invited to partake in tasting the freshly made hummus.

Gotta go. I think I hear another recipe is being mixed up....using freshly picked produce, of course.

Updates to July Calendar

There have been a few updates to our July classes and events. Due to Day Camp, our Good Morning Garden story hours have been suspended until mid-August. Also, you'll note that our Small & Container Gardening class has been moved to Saturday, July 31st.

We have been so busy in the Garden that we haven't had much time to post, but we promise that more photos and Garden updates will be coming soon.