Yellowstone Camping Trip Top 5 Tips

Hello everyone! I'm back from the land of no internet access, bison and geysers. I had a BLAST in Yellowstone National Park. We had amazing weather (only one thunderstorm for an hour or so one evening), and managed to see so much more than I expected. If you're thinking about making the trek, I highly recommend it and have a few tips for first time Yellowstone-goers.

SUMMER!!!

I'm done with finals! It's finally summer! It's crazy that I only have one more year left of college. This blog has been part of almost the whole journey and I can't wait for what the next year will bring. To start off my summer I'll be hitting the road with my boyfriend and his family to go camping in Yellowstone National Park. We're leaving tomorrow and driving the first twelve hours in one shot and then doing the rest on Tuesday. Then we'll be in Yellowstone until Saturday or Sunday before heading home through South Dakota and catching a bit of sightseeing along the way. I've never been "out west" before (unless you count staying in the city of Pheonix for a week and not going anywhere else) so seeing big mountains and all that will be a pretty new experience for me. I'm excited and I'm ready to just go with whatever happens on the trip. I figure that's the best way to approach camping, especially when it might be cold or rainy. I'm bringing about 5 jackets though so I should be ready for anything. 

I'll hopefully have a post up about the trip right after I get back. I start my internship for our Univerisity Student "Cornercopia" Organic Farm on the 27th so hopefully I'll have lots about that throughout the summer. I also have a 10 x 12 ft plot at the farm that I get to mess around with for the summer so that'll be my personal garden. Our apartment only has blacktop in back so sadly no growing of veggies will be done there.

Hope all of your summers are starting off nicely and weird weather isn't making the beginning of the growing season too difficult!

Almost Summer

I've been pretty quiet lately because I'm coming to the end of my junior year of college and man am I busy! But tomorrow is my last day of normal classes and then I only have finals week to deal with. I have one presentation, a lab report, one take-home final and two normal finals (one in Plant Physiology and one in Organic Farm Management) that stand between me and three months of freedom. 

I'm pretty excited about this summer break. The first week after finals I'll be traveling out to Yellowstone National Park with my boyfriend and his family and then when I come back I'll be starting my job as a Marketing Intern for the University of Minnesota's Student Organic Farm. I'll get to help with farm duties, run a farmers market stand and do all the other things I've yet to learn that happen on a farm. I also will have a 10x12 vegetable plot to myself that I'll be growing tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, beans and peas in. I had a post a while back about what tomatoes I've got ready to go for the year, and they're all getting a lot bigger on my kitchen windowsill right now.

Of course, I also can't wait to go home to Michigan for parts of the summer as well. I haven't been home since January, which is a bit too long, if you ask me. But otherwise, I'll be spending my time in Minnesota and enjoying all the free time that I don't have during the school year. I also have to think about what's going to happen after college is done because I only have a year left...... My mind is somewhat blown by this. How am I already getting to my last year of undergrad??? Crazy.

I'll be checked out for the next week or so because of finals, but hopefully I'll have some great Yellowstone camping pictures and farm pictures for you within the month!

Daily Dose of Adorable

For the past three weeks, I've been going into a local K-12 charter school to teach Horticulture to 3rd and 4th grade students. Our 3-week long project was growing microgreens in each of the classrooms to teach kids about germination, parts of a plant and how we can eat plants in different ways to make meals healthier for us. The first time we went into the school and explained to the kids what we'd be doing and that we'd get to eat the microgreens on the last class day, there were a few "Well...I probably won't eat them..." mutters from a few of the kids. They think green, they think vegetable and they immediately throw up the red flag. However, you will probably hear this from anyone who grows food with kids, but if the kids grow something themselves, they have a MUCH larger chance of eating it. And I found this to absolutely true. The last day came, we harvest the microgreens (peas and sunflowers) and they went to town. They devoured the microgreens, going back for seconds and thirds. They were so excited at how good the greens tasted. "I didn't know you could eat sunflowers!" they squealed and some grabbed handfuls asking for a plastic bag to take them home in. I would consider that a success. 

So, for the second part of my cute story, here's all the thank you notes me and my teaching partner received. They're great artists, and I was so happy to see some of them say that they were more inspired to garden. This solidifies my opinion that kids are more likely to garden when they have a teacher or mentor help them along. Do you help any of the kids in your life work in a garden and grow plants? I'd love to hear about it!

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.

Hip-Hop Remixes Science

So, just a short post on a few videos I found on Youtube the other day about the organization Science Genius. This isn't totally garden related, but it's so cool that I just had to share.
Science Genius is an organization working with New York schools with communities of students that don't really connect to science all that well. What they do is try to connect science to something they do know well: Hip-Hop and Rap. Just hearing that alone made my science education bells go off and I had to know more. With my current class about how to get kids more interested in plants and horticulture in new and exciting ways, this is an awesome example of that creativity that we need in today's classrooms.
I'll let the videos explain more.

Hip Hop Remixes Science (Science Genius Part 1)

Wu-Tang's GZA drops knowledge at Bronx Compass (Science Genius Part 2)

If you don't think this is one of the coolest things they've come up with so far to teach science, then please enlighten me as to what is.

Suddenly, Tomatoes

I may have gotten in a bit over my head today. After potting up tomatoes for the Student Organic Farm here at my university, there were dozens of extras left over. I maaaay have snagged six seedlings on top of the four seedlings I'm already attempting to germinate at home. And, oh yeah, we grafted some tomatoes earlier in class, so that's two more if both the grafts heal. So that's potentially 12 TOMATO PLANTS worth of fruit that I'll have to find something to do with this summer. Anyone know how to can?
There is a reason, however that I snagged all these seedlings. They're really cool varieties that I just couldn't pass up. The best part? All the plants come from organic seeds.

The new plants that have taken up residence on the kitchen windowsill are:

Sunrise Bumblebee: Props to whoever named this one because there's no way you could forget a tomato name like that.

Fox Cherry: This one you can find through Seeds of Change and is a vine variety.

Lemonade: Sadly, it's very difficult to find a picture of this tomato. Google only gives me recipes for tomato lemonade. It'd be helpful if I could remember what company supplies it, but I saw a seed packet once a month or so ago...


Indigo Rose: I'm really excited to grow a deep purple (or black, since that sounds more impressive) tomato. Another exciting part is anthocyanins, the chemical that causes the dark color, are powerful anti-oxidants.


Sun Sugar: This tomato has been named a favorite for sweetness and is an incredibly vigorous producer. 

Striped Roman: This one not only looks awesome, but is the best sauce tomato the farm grows.

So, as you can tell, I'm pretty excited about growing all of these varieties. On top of these, if those grafted tomatoes hold up, I'll have Marvel Striped tomatoes to add to the list. I also just started some regular Roma tomatoes and some Amana Orange from seeds I already had. It's going to be a big tomato fest this summer and I can't wait to get started!