Congrats, Garden Club!

Last night at the ECOS (Eckerd College Organization of Students) Givers Banquet the Garden Club was awarded Best Service Club Award, the second time we've been awarded this title in our 3 and half years as a club!

Oh, and did I mention we were on the front page of the local section of the Tampa Bay Times after our visit to the Green Thumb Festival last Saturday? 

Way to go, gardeners!

This year alone we've had over 90 volunteers, worked over 900 cumulative service hours, and have grown many, many sustainable fruits, veggies, herbs and habitat plants.
We just planted 11 native trees that will grow to provide habitat for creatures of all sizes and shade for future generations of garden-lovers.

Now it's time to celebrate Harvest Fest style!

Remember: A hand that's dirty with honest labor is fit to shake with any neighbor.

Deb

Harvest Festival Spring 2013!!!

It's that time again already, folks. 

Time to stuff ourselves full of delicious, fresh food. 

Time to listen to great live, local music. 

Time to celebrate another wonderful year of growth in the EC Sol Food Grow-Op and the gardeners who don't mind getting a little dirty to support it. 

Here are the details: 
Saturday, May 11th
5:30 pm - sundown

~Vegetarian pot-luck (please feel free to use food from the garden)
~Located in the the EC Sol Food Grow-Op*
~Live music and entertainment

There will be a contest for the best dish (appetizer, main and dessert categories), but you gotta bring your tasty masterpiece by 6:30 to be judged. Winners will be announced and awards given shortly after.

Questions? Contact:
Deb Hilbert, President Garden Club
325-232-3278, drhilber@eckerd.edu

RSVP @ the EC Sol Food Grow-Op Harvest Festival Facebook page

*Located on Eckerd College campus between the sports fields. Parking can be found behind the tennis courts or the Turley Athletic Complex. 
In the case of rain, the festival will be in Fox Hall. 

It's been a rewarding three and a half years in the Grow-Op, and I'll miss the garden and all of the friends I've made through it dearly. I'll be honest with y'all, this event means as much to me as graduation...

SO YOU BETTER COME OUT AND CELEBRATE!

Love and peas, 

Deb

Here's a sneak peak (photos from last semester's HF):

Bon Appetit

Last month we had Nicole Tocco, a fellow from Bon Appetit (the company in charge of the food on campus) come out to Eckerd. Her job is to work with students to raise awareness about pressing food issues such as farm worker rights, climate change, humane treatment of animals, local food and sustainable fishing practices. She also serves as a connection between students and their caf. Her visit was highly anticipated by us gardeners, many of whom have been pushing for healthier, tastier, more sustainable food on campus. Here are some pics Nicole took while touring the garden and joining the compost crew on a shift:

Nicole took Cat Pappas and I to Mixon Fruit Farms, a local citrus farm in Sarasota where we will be getting the oranges for the fresh OJ machine this spring and in future years. They may not be organic, but they are a friendly and family owned and operated farm and they are LOCAL! And they feed all their orange peels from making the orange juice to the cows across the street. These are not oranges from California like we keep hearing! The farm is really beautiful and multi-purposed- they hold weddings there, maintain a koi pond and a butterfly maze for kids, have a wildlife sanctuary and theres even a store where you can buy their citrus products or the produce from their local farmer friends as well as any other kind of trinket you can imagine (and fudge).  Nicole certified Mixon as a farm to fork vendor for Bon Appetite and wants to ensure they have a long term contract with us. 

Later that day, Nicole and Jamie from Bon Appetite met with the garden club to talk about ways to get the Grow Op more involved with the campus cafeteria. Already the caf saves their food prep scraps for us to use in the compost, and we've given food to them in the past. 
We came up with a few ideas that won't require the garden to provide a constant supply of food:
1. Garden Club can make educational table tents to put up in the caf and have a booth where we can talk about food sustainability and local agricultural issues
2. Garden Club can make educational signs for the hydroponic garden on the caf patio
3. Garden Club can supply occasional surplus veggies and/or herbs to the cafeteria

We'll continue to talk about how the garden and the caf can work together in a way that supports each other's goals. There's definitely much to discuss as the garden becomes more established.

Interested in campus farm initiatives? Check out these sites created by Nicole!
http://kgi.org/group/campus-farmers
http://www.facebook.com/groups/campusfarmers/

~Sam and Deb

Garden Tea Party

Our last garden meeting was also a tea party. Deb brought out a collection of dried herbs, leaves and flowers from the garden and empty tea bags. She taught us about their medicinal benefits and also turned our attention to the things in the garden that we can eat, such as the leaves of the Passion Fruit Vines and the Meyer Lemon flowers. We all filled up our tea bags as desired and enjoyed some flavorful, healthy, local and organic teas! Some of the things that we used for our tea that you can go grab right now and dry out are:

-Passion Fruit Leaves-have potential anti-cancer effects, aid in digestion and relaxation
-Guava Leaves-good for digestion, tastes a little sweet
-Lemongrass-tastes really good
-Mint and chocolate mint-gives it a minty green tea kind of taste
-Lavender-has anti-anxiety properties
-Borage-leaves and flowers-this is a good mood elevator
-Meyer lemon tree flowers-smell and taste lovely, add a nice accent to the tea

Ask Deb for more medicinal and tea uses! And go out and take advantage of these amazing resources-why drink that crappy coffee they give us here if you can walk just a bit further for some fresh herbal tea?

Dirt!

We've been working hard and getting dirty building the new beds this past week. The wood was rotting out of our old and comfy raised beds and our plants were near about to fall out. So we removed all the wood from any beds that were falling out and lined the edges of the beds with cinder blocks (which are not as heavy as we all were expecting them to be). Now our edges are taller and more 'root-proof'', allowing us to further build up the beds if we so decided.

So next we have to look into soil and bed building techniques. The nearby Edible Peace Patch, where many of our Sol-Food gardeners also volunteer, has started using a modified hugelkultur technique, layering different organic materials in a big pit under the beds. The materials they have used include fish bones, manure, oak leaves, more fish bones, mulch, compost and soil builder for the final layer. The organic materials decompose continuously over time because it is so deep and layered, keeping nutrients present and encouraging deeper root growth. At the Boyd Hill garden, we used seaweed, mulch and soil builder to make up the beds. Seaweed is supposedly awesome in retaining nutrients and water and we have plenty of it for free off our seawalls here. In my botany class the other week we discussed a little soil science and learned about clay, silt and sand in the soil. Clay has the highest ability to attract and retain the molecules of water, which then contributes to the retention of nutrients (not to mention the water needed to decompose organic material, further building nutrients into the soil). So I was thinking that adding a layer of clay to the bottom of our beds could help too. But where in Florida do you find clay??

Speaking of dirt....we should be getting some goat manure from the Dancing Goat farms shortly....yum!

New Growths

Hello Spring Seedlings!

The garden has been busy getting beds weeded and planted so far this semester. Most of our plants from last semester and this winter have gone to seed/flower so we have been seed harvesting for the past week so that we will keep the successful seeds around for next year. So with the old kickin' itself out by flowering, it is time to bring in the new plants with the warming weather! Just on Monday this week we transplanted some cosmos, planted arugula, and put an eastern cedar in the ground. We've recently started some zucchini and squash, which could be our last round of these guys in the next year or so because we have to replenish our soil. We have a few other starts going too that will be planted into the beds within the coming weeks. We've planted two varieties of basil (that are beginning to sprout!), lettuce, arugula, sunflowers, and some others.

As for food that's already good for eats....
You can still eat the kai-lan or gai-lan and it's flowers (good for soups and stir-fries). The blue-star flower (aka borage, Borago officinalis) is growing well and has a few medicinal benefits in addition to being an anti-depressant. The Rainbow and regular type chard are still goin' pretty strong and there are broccoli florets which are awesome in salads. The spectacularly spicy and delicious arugula (my favorite green out there right now, if ya couldn't tell) has begun to flower so eat the lasts of it while you can!  We've still got rutabaga and turnips for life it seems and the kale has refused to die down so go grab your handfuls or bucketfuls now so we can plant some new stuff soon! The tomatoes and strawberries are starting to ripen up too-keep an eye out for these little nibbles before the ants nibble on em. So I hope you guys are going out there and gettin' creative making the sweetest of salads and dankest of stir-fries....not to mention all the awesome nutritional and sustainable benefits of your garden meals

Enjoy the noms!