Spring is Here!

One day it was winter and the next it wasn't. Just as winter was starting to become unbearable, we were hit with rising temperatures into the 50s and even very, very low 60s. It was like the universe answered all of the north's silent (and not so silent) prayers for spring. The warmth is making me even more excited to get done with my degree and enjoy a summer of growing food, working (hopefully!), and hanging out in the Twin Cities. 

Sunshine and 60 degrees on campus.

One exciting, new piece of life is that I've signed on as a member of Southeast Como's FairShare Farm! FairShare has a really neat model that allows members to pay a small, one-time fee, work a few set hours per week at the farm, and then receive a portion of every harvest. No one has their own individual plot, but all the plots are shared and rotated every year in keeping with good crop rotations. So it's somewhat like a CSA and a community farm smooshed into one. I'm just excited to be working with others who share my passion for gardening and meeting people from my neighborhood at the same time. 

One of the old grain towers near my house.

Otherwise, things are pretty normal. I'm heading home to Michigan for spring break on Saturday, leaving my roommates to have fun in the Twin Cities without me. But it'll be great to have a relaxing week of sleeping and taking care of myself. I'll also be helping out my dad who's having surgery on his knee while I'm home.

Once I get back, it's full steam ahead on seed-starting. The only thing I have going right now are perennial, native, pollinator friendly seed mixes started in some makeshift greenhouses (juice containers with holes poked in them) sitting outside. Since they don't mind the cooler temps, I've left them to generally fend for themselves with the occasional watering. I didn't want to start anything else until after spring break because I didn't want to leave newly-started seeds on their own for eight days... But I'm planning on some small space gardening at my own house as well as having things to grow at FairShare. I have some dry beans that I want to grow simply for seed-saving purposes (with the couple of beans I have, I wouldn't be able to grow enough to eat), as well growing some mini-bell peppers in pots for the ledge outside. I have several tomato varieties I'll probably offer to start for my family members as well. 

The last project I have are some perennials that I grew from cuttings in plant production last semester. I have some rugosa roses, a hydrangea, a mum and a pretty crispy-looking cold-hardy hibiscus (don't know if that one has made it...). I attempted overwintering them in our cooler stairway area and once it warms up even more, I'm going to set them outside, throw on some fertilizer and see if they come back. 

I'll probably have a seed-starting post up eventually, but this semester has been way more crazy than I thought. Plant genetics has been tricky and keeping up with it is requiring tons of work. But I just have to keep it up until the beginning of May...

Hope you all are enjoying the lovely spring weather, wherever you are!

Winter Has Come

Like most of you in the Northern and Eastern US, we got hit with snow this weekend, bringing to an end the fall that we thought would last us at least through Thanksgiving. Unlike our usual first snows in Minnesota, this snow (and ice) has stuck, with daytime temperatures hovering in the high 20s at most.

A picture of my walk into St. Paul campus taken from my phone.

Despite this, things are heating up in my Plant Production class and being able to work under the sunlamps a few days out of the week is a godsend. I definitely picked the right major for that reason. My crops are doing well now that I've learned what I need to do in order to fertilize them properly and our lettuce crops are about ready to take home for salad. Now I just need to find a way to get my boyfriend to actually eat salad...
I've also got an eggplant, two cucumbers and some cherry tomatoes that I'll be taking home next week. I'm not a huge cucumber fan so I'll have to find something creative to do with them, or just find a person who likes cukes more than me to take them. If I have the time, I'd love to try frying the eggplant that I have with my roommates deep-fryer.

For my World Food Problems class, my end-of-term paper is looming ever larger on the horizon and I'm still torn about what I want my topic to be. I have to have it finalized by next Tuesday so I'll have to dive into some research this weekend. My original idea is researching the importance seed-saving has in African cultures and how that relates to food security... But if I can't find enough written on that I might have to change to something else. I have a lot of strong feelings about GMOs (although not in the normal hell-bent against them sort of way) that I could write a paper on... Speaking of which, I will probably at least post something here about my opinions on them soon. Regardless, I need a topic that I can research and write about easily because I want to make this paper actually meaningful.

The last few things that have been happening lately have all been reminding me that I'm almost done with school. I met with my academic adviser to finalize my class schedule for next year, I register for those classes tomorrow and, after next week, I'm done with the regular season of marching band for the last time. I don't really know how to handle all of these emotions because there's just a huge, jumbled, confused mess of them. I'm happy and sad and nervous and everything else all at the same time. As many of my friends would say "#SeniorProblems".

And speaking of being done, yesterday was my last home football game as a member of the University of Minnesota Marching Band. Symbolically flipping my uniform overlay to the maroon side of a graduating member at the game was so bittersweet and leaving the field after my last halftime show was one of the hardest things I've had to do. This group has given me so much over the course of my college career and I've made some of the best memories I think I'll ever have of college as a member of it.

Me and my family who came down to see my final show.

I think that's what this winter has mainly brought with it: the realization that I'm going to be done with this stage of my life soon and I have this huge stretch of uncharted territory in front of me. It's not really like the rest of life where I have a set system to work inside of. There's no school where I can just work my way through a more-or-less comfortable set of hoops. Basically I have to be a real person and that's sort of terrifying. Exciting, yes, but definitely terrifying.

Random Farm Knowledge: Part 1

Working on the organic farm at my university this summer has quickly taught me a lot of things. Lesson Number One is to ask A LOT of questions. I feel like asking questions is part of my job. I've also started to accumulate a lot of random bits of knowledge. Most of this comes from my amazing supervisor who's been with the farm since it started and did her Horticulture undergrad and Ag Education masters at my university. Other stuff comes from trial and error (aka: Abby makes a mistake and then doesn't make that mistake again). This is the first part of the Random Farm Knowledge series that I'll try to do every so often.

1. White Dutch Clover makes an awesome row cover and cover crop. Why spend time weeding pathways when you can just seed it with clover and let that grow up instead? It also makes awesome pollinator habitat and just looks so darn pretty.

2. Cucumbers, watermelons, squashes, zucchini, etc don't like their roots touched. These plants can often be finicky transplants, and a big reason why is that if you touch their roots too much when transplanting, they get kinda upset.

3. You can eat lambsquarters. I've been pulling this weed out of gardens my whole life, not knowing that the small plants can be eaten in salads. Crazy.

4. Speaking of lambsquarters, quinoa is in the same family as the common weed, so herbicides that kill lambsquarters can also harm quinoa.

5. YOU CAN MAKE JELLY OUT OF DANDELIONS!!  You only use the yellow petals and it makes an amazing jelly. Our supervisor made it and we tried it on gingersnaps, which was awesome.

6. You can grow cold-hardy kiwis. So that's pretty awesome.

That's it for now! But hopefully I'll accumulate some more Random Farm Knowledge soon!

How to Graft Your Own Tomatoes

Some of you may have seen grafted tomatoes cropping up in garden centers over the past couple of seasons. But what really is the difference between a grafted tomatoes and non-grafted tomatoes? Grafted tomatoes have turned up for many of the same reasons that we graft other plants. Tomato grafting first because practice in the 1960s when grafting was mainly done to make the tomato plants more disease resistant. Now, grafting is done for a number of different reasons. Sometimes growers graft tomatoes so that they are more resistant to abiotic stresses (salinity, drought, flooding) or they choose rootstocks that are better suited to their growing conditions (soil, temperatures, etc). This hardier rootstock is then attached to a scion (aka "the top part") of a variety that the growers want. In some cases, grafting can also cause the tomato plant to be higher yielding, extending it's growing season at the beginning and the end.

One common factor among grafted tomatoes that you'll see when you're shopping around your garden center this spring is that, usually, these plants are more expensive than your normal tomato plants. For some, the cost is worth it for the higher yield and higher tolerance to several factors. But if you want to try your hand at grafting and skipping the higher prices at the register, here's a step-by-step tutorial for grafting your own tomato plants.

New Semester, New Classes!

Hello all! Apologies for being quiet on the blog front lately, but the beginning of the semester has kept me with very little free time for blogging. (Pro tip: Follow me on Twitter, I'm much more active there in busy times than on my blog!) But now that I have a quieter night to myself, I get to sit down and attempt to capture your interest with the new classes I'm taking.
First up, we have Successful School Gardens. If you saw my last post, you'll know that I'm traveling to England over spring break in March to learn about and teach in schools there with school gardens. This class runs for the whole semester, so we'll be preparing for our trip, as well as writing the lesson plans for teaching a class to students in multiple schools there. After we come back from London, we'll be paired up with schools here in the Twin Cities and will be teaching lessons about apples and microgreens to K-12 students. All the schools we will be paired with have existing school garden programs so we can learn how they work as well. I don't have too much to report on this since I've only been to the class once. It only meets once per week and the first class got cancelled due to extreme cold. (Don't even get me started on how cold it's been in Minnesota this winter!) This class also has a blog so I'll post links to those updates when they start rolling in.
Next up is Organic Farm Management. This is a class that really ties together a lot of things I find interesting. The first thing is, obviously, food. We're learning how to best grow good food in the climate we live in. The second thing, is organic farming. This class works specifically with the "Cornercopia" Student Organic Farm on campus to help them start a lot of the produce that they raise and sell over the course of the summer. Expect a lot of pictures from this class once we start growing all of those.

One of the seedlings from our seedling identification lab. Hard to tell it's an eggplant when it's that small!

Plant Physiology is the most lab intensive courses out of everything I'm taking. The course is actually classified as a "Writing Intensive" course (we need a certain number of these in order to graduate) so a lot of emphasis is put on scientific writing for lab reports. Most of our lab work is focused on environmental effects on crops such as amount of light, nutrient deficiencies, heat/cold, and how all of this affects the plant's growth. We've got a lab going right now testing germination and growth of plants with 16 hours of sun, 8 hours of sun and zero hours of sun. Pretty easy to tell what's going to happen, but the results are interesting to watch nonetheless.
Last but not least is "Sustainable People, Sustainable Planet". This is the only non-Horticulture class that I'm taking this semester and I LOVE it. We talk and read about sustainability as it relates to all different parts of life. Social justice, economy, environment, food systems, you name it. We've only been in class for around three weeks and I've already learned so much. My next post is probably going to be a bunch of stuff I've learned so far that I think everyone should be aware of. Our readings are incredibly interesting as well, so I'll definitely start posting links to those on here and on my Twitter account for you all to check out. Most are very accessible and thought-provoking reads. One big thing we started out looking at is planetary boundaries. I've included a diagram below. It's pretty self-explanatory, but basically the outer ring is the ceiling of where we should keep ourselves to stay within the Earth's resources and the inner ring is the floor that we should be above in terms of poverty, individual rights, education, etc.

Then this is where we are in terms of the inner circle. This means we're below where we should be when it comes to these things.



And then this is where we are in terms of the outer circle (the planetary boundaries) for things related to the environment and our impact on it.



Quite the difference, huh? This class has definitely put a lot of things in perspective for me. There's a lot I still have to learn about sustainability, but I really hope after this class I know how to communicate these ideas to people better so we can all work together to help change the way we interact with the natural world.
And that's all folks! You'll likely see more class related blog posts coming soon, and in the meantime don't forget to follow me on Twitter and Pinterest to keep up with my day to day activities and see what interesting things I've found around the web!