Baby, it's cold outside!

A week of early snow in Somers, MT and a natural disaster in New York, NY. Katie feels a lot like a smushed cold bean after trekking uptown to locate some semblance of civilization and a shaky internet connection. She empathizes with the actual beans in the garden that are enduring the onslaught of winter.

What's the good news? So far, Robin and her students have harvested 150 pounds of pumpkins alone! 150! That's the weight of the average person...but in pumpkins! Tomatoes and basil are toughing it out in the green house while outside the carrots hunker down and continue to grow. It's heart warming to  know that the garden's high production has made it an asset in addition to a joy. It's double heart warming to hear that the kids are taking good care of the garden.

On October 24th, the schools were fed a Grown in Montana meal AND it was the best attended meal to date! Over 600 plates were served. As Robin said, there's "nothing like that fresh homegrown to get butts in the seats." Combining Montanan pride and eating well? You can't get much better than that!

The coolest thing that EVER happened

Our idol.

Our hero.
Our inspiration.
Jamie Oliver.

Our work in Somers was a single and solid rung in the ladder of reshaping the world's relationship with food. Jamie Oliver has done so much to further the Food Revolution and we could not be more honored that:

We, meaning Robin, Jordan & Katie, were asked to write an article about our experience with the Americorps in Montana. You can check out the article here.

Yesterday, lovely news from Robin concerning the garden arrived by telegram (people other than Katie call this gmail). The kids are covering the tomatoes and basil to protect them from the nippy frost of the coming fall. Pumpkins are blushing with color and heavy in weight, they have said farewell to the first couple of batches of basil which have been prepared into pesto and frozen for future delight, i.e. yum yum!

How great, an update!

From an internet cafe tucked away in Manhattan's lower east side, Katie types away, eyes beaming as she looks over the most recent photos of the SMS garden Robin has sent our way.

The pumpkins have grown in all directions, banishing the bed to invisibility; meanwhile, the tomatoes and tomatillos have bushed out to look less like leaves and more like a giant's bed head.

If you look closely, to the left of the bed, there are pots of marigolds keeping the bugs away from the fattening tomatoes.

In the courtyard, where birds are a greater worry than bugs, the painted ladies have fanned out and are loaded with beans.










The garden is doing so well and, soon enough, we will have our final number on the weight of all food harvested! Excitement!

Fare thee well, Fair Flathead

The good stuff
We have accomplished all of our goals from the beginning of the summer and the garden is fully prepared for whatever trials this school year brings. Pathways are in the garden and the hydroponic is functioning once more. We even have a few bonus accomplishments---there are newly planted radishes in barrel-like pots by the greenhouse.

With your quick mind, you are probably wondering, how is the wind not tossing around the sawdust if it moved even large cardboard sections? Worry not, sweet reader. The sawdust is just small enough and the sprinklers just wet enough to create the perfect anti-storm. As an added plus, after speaking with 20+ lumberyards, we stumbled upon RBM lumber who contributed so much sawdust that the search abruptly ended. The pathways are complete, thanks to RBM, Lowe's, Home Depot, and Kalispell Lumber. Haley Johnson of the Kalispell Feeding Program actually hooked us up with that last one.

As our term of service is officially done, we move mysteriously and gratefully onto the next stage in our lives. In the distant future, we will reunite to form an intergalactic rocket army, but until then...Katie will be returning to NYU to continue her acting training; Jordan is headed back to West Virginia to work as a farm assistant.

The good people
There are many people who made our summer so successful. Robin Vogler, our site supervisor, is the person who got us here. She applied for Summer VISTAs, was our final interviewer, and is the reason that there is a hydroponic system and a school garden to begin with. She has a vision and we are the extra pairs of hands that make it happen.

Another person we want to thank is Crissie McMullan, executive and creator of Grow Montana and Montana Foodcorps. She is an excellent resource for the answers to all of Katie and Jordan's respectively stupid and intelligent questions. She also gave us our Warholian 15 minutes by inviting us to guest post on the Montana FoodCorps website. You can find an article by Jordan here and one by Katie over here.

There is Abby Zent at the Prevention Resource Center, too, who is Katie's supreme supervisor (and does the all important job of pressing the "pay her" and not the "fire her" button). She also proofreads and approves all of Katie's blog posts. In addition, up until mid July, Jared Schmidt, the 2011-12 PRC VISTA, was the first person to interview Katie and, after deciding she wasn't Hannibal Lector 2.0, made sure she didn't get lost on her drive out to Montana.

Countless Montanans have helped this summer. We applaud them eternally.

Auf Wiedersehen
The emotion Katie feels as she writes this post is a mixture of confusion, as she is discussing deeply personal mental workings in third person, and great sadness, as she knows this is her final post on somers-harvest. There will likely be another post in the autumn discussing the garden's yield and how far we surpassed our goal of 1000 pounds, but this is the last time she will post during her Americorps service.

How to best describe the pain inside her heart of hearts?

D:

Yes, that's it exactly. 

We will miss you, Montana, but who knows just when we might see you again. It might not be until next summer or the next decade, but we will always carry your beauty in our memories and your soil under our fingernails.

Until next time!

You want...our sawdust?

Why yes, we do.

One of two major projects that we are starting and finishing this week is collecting sawdust from various home improvement stores and lumberyards. No, we're not going to eat it (although, our poverty level living stipends do make any offer of free food an offer of high interest). The sawdust will be placed over the ground cloth in the main garden. This will kill the grass and create a nice pathway around the raised beds. 

The act of cutting, lifting, and emptying industrial strength trash bags full of sawdust is not too difficult. The issue is how we transport the sawdust from store/lumberyard to our garden. 8 miles from Kalispell and a million from Whitefish, making the journey over and over is not ideal. Moreover, Katie's little car, correction: Katie's big brother's car that he [so so so generously] loaned her for the summer, can't carry more than one or two bags. Considering both her car and Jordan's contain all of their life's possessions, the sawdust is a pain in the butternut squash. 

Why go to the trouble then, Katie "Peter Pettigrew" Looney?

If it isn't already blatantly obvious, we the Americorps are empowered youth. We can do literally anything with proper planning, collaboration, and will power. The section of finished pathway looks much better than the dead and half dead grass, and that alone strengthens our resolve. In both Katie and Jordan's books of life, there is no going to the trouble of doing something. There is only the doing of what needs to be done. And then celebrating. Yay!

Yes, yes, such a sentimental pep talk has no precedent, expect for maybe our Fourth of July post. We'll get back to business then. 

Prithee, what's the second major project?

As of this moment, the hydroponic system looks like a skeleton. It's as if we spent the last 9 1/2 weeks locating an elephant graveyard and moving our corpse of choice into the hydroponic shed. Okay, maybe it doesn't look that much like a skeleton, but it could pass for the bones of a plastic extraterrestrial.

Jordan is spending the week getting it up and running again. This process involves refilling the system with a solution of water and nutrients and then transplanting basil into pumice pots. She's going to get that done in three days?! Nope, she is going to get that done in less than three days because she is also playing phone tag with the NW Drug Task Force to get her hands on confiscated chemicals. For the middle school. Duh. Or...wait...Jordan?

Checkmark, Checkpoint, Checkmate

To apologize for the delay between this post and the last, Katie bows fully and lowly.

Why did Katie do such a thing? How could she deprive you, dear reader, of an update on the garden for a solid week and a half? Well, if you can imagine two pen wielding hands frantically crossing off items on a list...you're not imagining anything. You just happened to magically apparit (potter style) to our office at Somers.

Mr. Onion meets Mr. Bunion

We will be crying tears of blood when we are forced to leave Montana on August 12th. But until then, we are engaging in the Final Push of Doom. Sounds dangerous, right? Don't worry, the risks involved are minimal. Either Katie will face early baldness due to stress or Jordan will sign a deal with Beelzebub to employ demonic minions to finish the remaining tasks. Eh, minimal.



Checkmarks
What we have left to do, to cross off with a satisfying checkmark, is the following---

Guess which section hasn't been stained

• Weed all raised beds
• Finish plant labels
• Transplant basil in the green house to the hydroponic shed
• Laminate plant labels
• Put ground cloth and sawdust down in the main garden to establish walkways
• Harvest onions and garlic
• Plant purple mountain spinach and remaining kale seeds
• Order more butterhead lettuce seeds
• Pick raspberries to make preserves
• Figure out who will water the garden when we leave (ah!)
• Clean and refill hydroponic system
• Start notebook for weights and dates for all harvested produce
• Finish staining the hydroponic shed
• Put straw down on top of existing grass mulch under the tepee trellis
• Weed everything (aka oy vey)

Items that have been lovingly slashed with a line were completed in the last few days.

Checkpoint
What checkpoint? Well, the one marking this our last week! Hence the creation of the above list!

Checkmate(s), or our greatest successes
1. Jordan drained and scrubbed the entire hydroponic system. It will be up and running before we leave so that the students will be able to plant the next round. Plus, we have a notebook filled with our experience stabilizing the pH so that the doing-this-for-the-first-time struggle will be avoided.

2. Katie harvested the onions out of the main garden, laid down ground cloth, and finished staining the shed. The onions were laid out on a tarp to dry for 2 1/2 days and are now swaddled within the same tarp on a counter in the school kitchen.

Ready, Set, GO GET EVERYTHING DONE!

T-minus 18 days

To continue learning best practices, we trekked over to Loon Lake Gardens & Pottery to meet Gayle Prunhuber and weed one of her garden beds. We got to feed the pulled weeds to her chickens and goats and go for a swim in Loon Lake! On top of that, Gayle sent us home with generous tubs of goat cheese and one bag each of fresh produce. The cheese suffered severe mutilation within minutes of entering our possession.

The next day, we drove along N Somers Rd to the Lighthouse where we planted squash from their greenhouse and had the opportunity to meet some of the housemates. The Lighthouse is a farm based christian home for adults with developmental disabilities. And these adults have busier schedules than most! Not only do they maintain the farm and house by tending to the heifers, pigs, and chickens, they are active members of the community. We barely got to see them on Friday because the majority had chosen to go out garage sale-ing that morning!

For many reasons, we are really lucky to have Robin Vogler as our supervisor, but one outstanding reason is that she encourages us to volunteer at sites throughout the community that might appreciate our extra hands/tentacles. Plus, we get to meet rad people like Gayle Prunhuber of Loon Lake and Shirley Willis, executive director of the Lighthouse. 

The weekend passed quickly and Monday hit us with that OMG SO MUCH TO DO energy we all know too well. Hunched over construction paper for two straight days, Jordan produced labels for each plant growing in the garden. Anyone passing by our office would have found her locked in a stooped posture, lording over sketches of tomatillos and kale. As her colored pencil beaus feature both drawings and names of the plants, kids will take greater ownership of the vegetables because they will be able to recognize the various plants that they themselves plant and harvest. 

The next step is to laminate them with an appliance none other than the laminator over at Lakeside Elementary School. The chances Jordan is going to pursue an MFA in Painting & Drawing once she's done here? Probably 7 out of 10, especially considering that the ghost of Edward Hopper is known to appear to her at midnight each night, whispering secrets of his craft. 

Meanwhile, Katie has struggled to understand how to use a drill. The birdhouses needed to have holes installed so that they could be hung on the garden fence with zip ties. Thanks to a couple of worthless e-How articles (don't explain what to do with a chuck key without first explaining what a chuck key is) and a few hours worth of experimentation/frustration (building castles out of drill bits, realizing batteries have to be charged, figuring out what a chuck key does), Katie gave up on the normal sized drills and turned to the drill press. That only makes sense: small machine doesn't work, turn to larger machine. Holes were drilled and the b-cribs were sprayed with clear coat.

Just fancy enough to work that tool belt 

Today is the 17 day marker for our time in Montana. In less than three weeks, including weekends, our terms of service will be over. We are confident about how much we plan to do before we leave and how much we will accomplish. Which is everything on the planning list, of course. 

"Run. Run away and never return." Or, Scar is to Simba what we are to hail storms

During her teaching stint at Lakeside, Katie played a game called Assassins with the campers. The game's rules loosely say that certain people are the murderers and they have to subtly assassinate the other players by tapping them on the shoulder. Although it's been a few weeks since she taught the kids this game, Katie had a chance to play murderers last Thursday. With a wolf spider. A wolf spider.

The job of weeding the onion bed has been neglected in recent time because the onions were doing so well that there wasn't a need. There is a thick layer of straw over the plants, too, so most weeds weren't even trying. Or, they were trying and failing horribly. After Jordan set up the potato towers (!!!) and Katie stained the hydroponic shed on Wednesday, it was inevitable that we would have to address the onions this week. In the corner of their king sized bed though, we found a perfectly shaped funnel web.  After searching for a large enough stick and positioning Jordan such that if the wolf spider freaked it would jump her way, Katie furiously stabbed the web and buried it deep in an unmarked grave.

Rumor has it that a hail storm is headed North through the valley. Jordan bulwarked the tomatoes, garlic, pumpkins, zucchini, swiss chard, and carrots with sections of cover cloth. As Katie had hogged the majority of the stakes to arrange cover sloth over the beds surrounding the greenhouse, Jordan [like a boss] was able to economize the remaining stakes and secure the larger main garden beds. Some tomato plants have been moved inside of the greenhouse as well as smaller planters filled with cilantro, thai basil, and italian basil.

The system behind who got to have absolute security was not a Deep Impact-esque lottery, but based on the vulnerability of plants. If we're talking wind and hail, plants in the courtyard have the overhang and walls on three sides to protect them, but plants around the greenhouse are susceptible to complete annihilation. If we're talking temperature, the greenhouse + close surroundings' tenants are set, but their courtyard fellows might be in trouble. This time the tomatoes outside the greenhouse lucked out and got to hide inside its fortress.

Come, violent storm! Come, we beg you to attempt destruction!
You will meet only failure!

Actually, don't. Just go away. And take the wolf spiders with you.

Signs of divinity and ethos (good people exist and so does good food)

We had our first harvest of the season on Monday! In the early morning, we pulled 10 butterhead lettuce plants from the hydroponic and half a dozen radishes right from their beds. All were washed, weighed, recorded, and transported to the Kalispell feeding program's central kitchen at Flathead High. Ideally, we will develop a relationship with the feeding program and eventually sell them our summer-born vegetables. The income generated from these sales will enable us and future Somers VISTAs to buy seeds and materials necessary for the garden.

When we went up to Woodland Park to help out the Kalispell Feeding Program with lunch, Katie let out a shriek of utter delight upon seeing the radishes we had pulled in a little container for the kids to eat. Tragically, the kids were momentarily stunned by the shriek. On the bright side, the kids were easily resuscitated not with smelling salts, but with the spicy allure of the radishes themselves. 

No single person is the backbone of the feeding program. The thoracic could be linked to Jennifer Montague, the Food Services Director for School District 5, who advocates the use of local foods in the feeding program's supplied meals. Perhaps the label of lumbar is best assigned to Katie Wheeler, the full year Americorps VISTA working with the Montana Foodcorps out of Flathead Valley Community College, who pushed for the implementation of a summer feeding program in this area. The cervical might be the chef behind the program's meals, Malcolm Orser, who incorporates the vegetables we donated into his menu. Haley Johnson, the PRC Americorps Summer Associate who coordinates the feeding program, is a huge section of the spine, too, as well as Shelia Musick who delivers Malcolm's dishes to each feeding site and serves meals at Woodland Park. Additionally, there are numerous community members who volunteer their time to serve breakfast and lunch. 

Clearly, this feeding program was not put together by one person. Its existence is the result of a community effort to provide kids with free, healthy meals throughout the summer. How awesome is that!

Continuing with the good news that just doesn't seem to end, we now have four brand new picnic tables at the middle school all paid for with grant money procured by Robin. If you haven't had the pleasure of sitting at one of the old picnic tables, imagine yourself on several giant splinters sloped at a 40 degree angle --- and that's why we replaced them.

Before ^
v After

Two newbies are in the courtyard area to provide students with smooth outdoor lunchtime seating. The other pair will be placed in the main garden, facilitating Robin's nutrition classes. They give her a more convenient space to hold her nutrition classes as instead of sitting in the dirt, the kids will be on picnic tables where they can plant seeds, harvest vegs, complete worksheets, and dream of glory. Plus, the surface area allows Robin to demonstrate garden activities. To preserve their wooden glory, we slathered preservative on their every inch. Our efforts were rewarded the next day with a huge thunderstorm that couldn't even moisten the tables.

More good news soon!

Elusive Solution, thy name is not cardboard

We really thought the cardboard was going to do the trick. And it sort of did. Sort of. The main garden is on a hillside, so it gets pretty windy. Remember, these are Montanan winds we're talking about so when I say winds, I mean super big gusts. Even the behemoth washer and dryer boxes slid around.

Uncovered spots of ground inevitably opened up between the moving sheets of cardboard. It was like trying to stop lava from pouring out of the ground while the tectonic plates just kept rubbing against each other for all eternity. But instead of lava, merciless spider armies appeared. The latter being far worse.

Jordan pillaged the cardboard nation and began to weed whack the undead grass in the main garden. Thankfully, the area is much nicer to walk on post-whack. However, the mosquitos who have in recent weeks nestled into the long grass swiftly exacted their revenge. They grow in numbers day by day despite the destruction of their habitat. Forget flowers or vegetables or year old manure, Lemon Eucalyptus insect repellent is a gardener's best friend.

At this point, we are looking into purchasing a used or new reel mower. The process of cutting grass would be more efficient and kids could help mow the main garden because there would be no scary gas powered spinning blades of death.

And guess what!
Round Two is in the hydroponic! Round One of butterhead lettuce will be ready for harvest next Monday. The newly tranplanted 36 baby butterheads are sitting pretty in their pumice sofas. We found an old aquarium tank screen at the Salvation Army's Mega Thrift Store in Kalispell and put it to use sifting the silt and dead plant material out of the pumice rocks. After Jordan sifted, Katie sterilized the rocks in the cafeteria ovens and planted the second round.

Looking over our 12 step goal list from last month, we noticed that we had accomplished almost all of them. What?/Hooray! These are the big goals we're working towards now:

1. Assemble potato towers
2. Install three birdhouses on garden fence
3. Acquire picnic tables for the garden
4. Clear out old shrubs and prickly weeds up against school building walls in courtyard and garden
5. Replace old shrubs and prickles with hollyhocks and marigolds
6. Stain the hydroponic shed and picnic tables
7. Train beans to climb tepee and fence
8. Paint maintenance shed
9. Make labels for each plant
10. Put together possible lesson plans for classroom garden use
11. Implement an improved watering system
12. Draw diagram of everything planted in garden, courtyard, and beds surrounding the greenhouse

We have quite the list and only a month left here in Montana! Here we go!

Garlic Ghosts of Christmas Past

The dinosaurs accidentally left their cast iron rain coats at home.

The Incan Empire didn't leave a note on their way out.

Marie Antoinette forgot that people other than her exist.

Benedict Arnold's pessimism got the best of him.

Taft ate too much cake.

Voldemort became greedy.

We planted pumpkins in the same bed as our thriving crop of garlic. 

They thrive no more.

To be fair, the half that remains is growing well and has already started to curl and produce a petite bosom of seeds. The pumpkins on the other hand are bigger every day. Each leaf is about the size of a hand. At the center of three of the five main garden pumpkins, a flower that looks very much like the mouth of a bright orange squid is blooming.

As summer is ACTUALLY STARTING TO HAPPEN in Somers, the weather has risen from a rainy 65 degrees to a sunny 90. SAY WHAT. The plants are loving all the sun, that is of course the plants that are outside. The issue is that the unlucky few that are inside the greenhouse are basically sitting in a sauna 24/7. Because of this, a mad rush ensued...a rush that can only be compared to the panic in 1938 caused by H.G. Well's adapted War of the Worlds radio drama.

Tomato plants cried out to us that they must be put in the ground. With only two small beds empty as of Thursday, there was really no place to put them. A massive reorganization effort began. Bush beans in pots were moved into rows by the courtyard birch tree. With four tomato size worthy empty pots in the greenhouse and now four more that once held bush beans, we had homes for eight tomato plants. But there were six left.

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrotclassics/2009/07/29/

Katie read enough Foxtrot comics in her youth to know that once zucchinis start producing, they don't stop. We abandoned our original plan to transplant squash starts into the empty small beds in favor of tomato relocation. The six were in the ground by night fall on Thursday.

Early Friday, Jordan observed that the basil starts destined for pumice pots in the hydroponic had been planted in soil instead of peat and perlite. The basil must be as clean as possible before being installed in the hydroponic and soil is much more difficult to clean off than peat and perlite. Luckily, eight long shallow planters and one small empty bed eagerly agreed to foster the orphan basils.

While Jordan filled the last bed, Katie sorted the last of the starts into long planters. Two long planters have frosty peas and six have basil babies. These long planters were put on a pallette donated by the roofers with the frostiest two being placed on the side next to the fence. Eventually, the peas will climb up the fence. Cool, right?!

There are still close to 30 homeless mystery squash. On the upside, what we can't find a place for will be donated to neighboring community gardens. Next week promises more sunny weather, which we welcome with open arms. Arms that are attached to hands that are attached to giant green thumbs. Naturally.

The day America decided that sitting at the kids table with the other British colonies just wasn't going to cut it anymore

Happy 4th, everybody!

With Robin's blessing, we are taking the day off to celebrate. July 4th is commonly spent in the company of those you hold dear---family and friends. Yet neither of us is from Montana. Jordan grew up in Oregon and Katie was raised in New York. Fortunately, despite the fact that our families are far from us, there is so much love here in Flathead Valley that we do not feel lonely on this holiday. We are met with welcoming smiles and encouragement everywhere we go in the valley. We are proud to call the Montanans we have befriended, well, our friends. Even occasionally humorous blog writers like us get sentimental sometimes.

Enjoy the day and maybe get some sleep tonight. Maybe?

Happy Birthday, America!
Love, Raspberries

One foot in the garden and one foot out

This week, we've used our mornings to work in garden while we have donated our time in the afternoon to volunteer at the Lakeside Summer Camp. Working with separate K-6 groups, Jordan taught gardening classes and Katie taught drama classes. Under Jordan's wing, the campers learned how to [successfully] transplant basil babies to a larger pot, what things in a garden can and cannot be eaten, and the similarities and differences between plants and people. The class experience has the students looking forward to working in the middle school garden that Jordan and Katie have gladly devoted themselves to this summer. The students also learned a valuable lesson: You cannot eat sidewalks.

Jordan nabbed three birdhouses that had been built by students in the middle school woodshop and had the campers paint them. While the MoMA did offer us over 55 million to install them as an exhibit this fall, we turned them down in favor of decorating our garden's perimeter fence. Pretty soon we will have a couple fine feathered friends joining us out in the garden! Katie is ecstatic about this, mainly because they look great, but also because she cannot wait for the birds to eat the spiders that have recently begun to pop up through the grass-killing cardboard.

Big J bravely fights an eight legged intruder

For her drama class, Katie called upon her acting training and played theatre games straight from Viola Spolin's repertoire, plus a few extras. The games they played included her personal favorites, Huggy Bear and Milling and Seething. Even the shyest of students became excited and involved. She believes that playing games like these that hold you accountable and require you to focus and contribute to the group help anyone of any age improve their self confidence and self image. The theatre games are so group oriented that they get kids out of the trap of narcissism, too. Needless to say, she was thrilled to teach the drama classes.


After their respective classes, the girls coached a sports clinic together. They led the kids in warm up, drills, and scrimmage. On Wednesday the group stretched like different animals, i.e. how does a cat stretch? a bird? a fish? Katie's personal favorite was the worm, aka wiggle on the ground for at least 5 minutes; Jordan's was the starfish, aka naptime. By the end of the day when the game of kickball, freeze tag, or soccer was over, Jordan and Katie had to use all of their remaining strength to drive back to Somers...and figure out the lesson plan for the next day.

Lakeside was so much fun and we're sad that our time there is over, but the garden at Somers is thriving and demanding that we give it our full attention. Prepare for a photographic onslaught in the next post! We have become like proud parents with our plants, taking pictures of everyday's smallest progress. We coo when a seedling peeps up through the soil, we document their eating habits (although the plants show no signs of moving onto solids, in the near future anyway), and we scold them when they refuse to stand up straight just because the sun isn't shining. 


And yes, we do talk to our plants. Lunchtime has become synonymous with storytime. Around 1pm today Katie was perched on a raised bed, reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the entire botanical population. The tomatoes love Levin. 

Gardners by day, wizards by night

Everything is growing. 

Many of our plants are entering adulthood and preparing to lay before us their vegetal bounty. Our harvesting workload will soon skyrocket, but so will the health of the middle schoolers. School won't be in session until September and our first round of crops will need a home. Where better than the Kalispell Feeding Program? What was our test round in the hydroponic has been a complete success. 

The hydroponic shed's butterhead lettuce plants are each larger than an individual human head. You could easily pelt someone with one of these guys and take them down. If you're thinking that we are actually the Montanan version of Dumbledore's Army, the secret student wizard coalition at Hogwarts that studied Defense Against the Dark Arts while Dolores Umbridge reigned as evil professor/headmaster, then I have to tell you that

That is Katie's single greatest dream.

But not our reality. 

The lettuce will be feasted upon at Kalispell feeding sites until the school year comes back into full swing and there are hungry middle schoolers ready for some delicious veggies. In addition, the herb garden in the courtyard is thriving. There are chives, chamomile, tarragon, peppermint, pineapple mint, lemon thyme, and oregano.

We are in the process of training the beans to climb the tepee and so far there is one painted lady bean plant that has figured out how much easier it is to grow if she just uses the stake two inches away from her. The others will catch on. 

If not, we'll get Professor Sprout to work her magic on them.

Life outside the garden

With the raised beds planted and hydroponic house gurgling along we will be taking a break from doting over our growing plants like new mothers in the coming week. As a reprieve from the relentless dirt-pushing and weed-pulling Katie and Jordan will both be leading activities at the summer day camp held at Lakeside Elementary next week. Putting our skills to use, Katie will be leading a drama group while Jordan attempts to get kindergarten through fifth-graders excited about gardening and nutrition.

In addition to a summer day camp, the site will also serve to host the summer feeding program for District 29. The summer feeding program is designed to provide access to a free lunch for children in areas where greater than 50% of the student population qualifies for free or reduced lunch during the school year. We have been involved with the summer feeding program in Kalispell since its start a couple weeks ago and have been excited to see the positive response from their community. 

We can't wait to see what this week is going to bring our way.

This kale is NOT for sale

After a morning of volunteering at Purple Frog (http://purplefroggardens.org/) which is a family market farm about a half hour North of Somers in Whitefish, we returned to the greenhouse with our arms full of kale, celery, and tomatillo starts. The co-partners of Purple Frog are Pam Gerwe and Mike Jopek, the two of which could not be more outstanding. Thanks to the overwhelming compassion of Pam and Mike, Jordan managed to procure a tray of approximately 30 kale starts.

Additionally, not only did we leave Whitefish invigorated by the plant starts we toted to the car like trophies and the flood of endorphins we were experiencing after a solid couple hours worth of weeding, we picked up a number of tips that will improve our work in Somers. While this is not so much a tip as it is a painful and yet necessary gardening lesson, one of the more memorable/edifying/pathetic conversations occurred as follows-

Katie(attempting to remove the weeds from a row of mustard): Hey so is this mustard?

Mike(looking at the bucket at her feet that appears to consist almost entirely of little pulled mustard plants): Yeah, you probably shouldn't pull any more of those.

Katie: Oh.

Once we got back to our greenhouse home base, we planted our new kale starts. Katie began to dig holes for the Red Russian while Jordan carefully tucked each Dinosaur into the soil. FYI We're talking about types of kale. The long term goal for the kale is to introduce this into the middle schoolers' lunches in the form of yummy kale chips.

Jordan also took on the job of finally planting the borderline rootbound sunflowers seeded by Robin's students in their last weeks of school. Arranged on the South facing side of the greenhouse, the sunflowers will be able to lean against the building's walls, adding to the garden space aesthetically and saving us from having to put stakes up for them later on.

Meanwhile, Katie began collecting cardboard to lay out over the expanse of grass in the main garden. The plan is to basically smother the grass with cardboard and put woodchips down in their stead. This will save us, Robin, and next year's Summer Vistas a ton of time that could be spent on something other than weeding an area that is too awkward to mow and too large to efficiently weed whack.

The cardboard collection continued into Thursday and prompted a visit to the Kalispell Super 1 and Smith's. Driving back to Somers with a New York liscense plate and a car jampacked with cardboard, Katie looked like she had moved to the Big Sky state to build herself a nice box. Worth it.

The summer continues with more and more of our starts in the ground, but better yet, more and more of those starts taking to their new homes outside, growing new leaves and little buds that will soon enough be tasty, healthy veggies.

Dirt should be weightless and able to fly uphill

Facing cruel and unrelenting abuse from seemingly perpetual afternoon rainstorms, we have for some completely unrelated reason dedicated the majority of our time this week to jobs that can be done inside. Luckily, we have been able to get to somethings that we have been neglecting. For example, there are eight raised beds that were built to fit around the greenhouse that needed to be painted. Done!

On Wednesday and Thursday, we lathered five of the beds with a charming green paint the exact color of split pea soup. We picked up some clear coat from Sliter's and sprayed it on the three remaining beds. Here's the best part of this post: those three beds are decorated with lovely depictions of vegetables and bugs, courtesy of our seventh grade artists.

To protect their artwork, we carefully rolled the beds out to the greenhouse and [had to be mini hulks] to lift them onto the gravel filled platform that the greenhouse was already positioned in the middle of. A humongous pile of manure goodness about 150 feet from the greenhouse beckoned and instructed us to fill the newly painted raised beds with its fecal joy. The issue? All of those 150 foots are on an uphill slant. Uphill. Thus, Monday and today consisted mainly of

 1. Filling the wheelbarrow with dirt

 2. Pushing the wheelbarrow uphill

 3. Shoveling the dirt from the wheelbarrow into the raised beds

 4. Pushing the wheelbarrow down the hill

 5. Repeating this FOREVER

Note: Every other time there is an additonal #6, which is Katie thanking god she filled up the wheelbarrow the last time so now it's Jordan's turn.

 The beds are filled with dirt now and we can focus on getting them filled with plants that will produce lots of food! As for a quick update on the hydroponic shed and the main garden (which has 6 large raised beds, not to be confused with the 8 smaller, split pea colored raised beds by the greenhouse), the pH in the hydroponic shed appears to have stabilized. We have maintained a pH of 6.1, reservoir of 13 gallons, and parts per million within a relatively tiny range for five straight days. We check those stats twice a day and record them in a logbook.

 The main garden currently boasts a fine looking row of raspberries, three pots of zinnias, five baby zucchinis, four baby pumpkins, a colony of onions, a rival colony of garlic, and several rows of carrots that have just started to peep out of the ground. The self seeded lettuce is ready for harvest and its replacement, a crew of swiss chard starts, will be planted in the main garden within the next week.

As of today, there be one less lonely hydroponic shed in the world

Good news. Scratch that. GREAT news--- The hydroponic shed is up and running!

"What. is. that." You're probably asking. Lemme tell you. Out behind the parking lot of Somers Middle School (SMS), a shed has been under construction for the last year. Inside of that shed are rows of PVC pipe, volcanic pumice rock, grow lights,  28 baby lettuce plants, and a continuous cycling solution of water and nutrients.

This shed is the brainchild of Robin Vogler, the director of SMS food service and our supervisor. The hydroponic set up will allow Vogler to grow lettuce throughout the fall and winter that can be used in the student's school lunches. Growing up in a family that used hydroponics to grow lettuce and tomatoes and being reminded at a conference of its potential, she launched its construction with the overall goal of improving the quality of the food she serves and thus the health of the SMS student body. We have to give a huge thank you to Kurt, the carpenter behind the walls, lights, piping, and pegboard that would not exist without his generosity. 

We concluded Tuesday with the transplantation of the lettuce planted by Robin's nutrition students into pots filled with pumice that were cleaned of plant material and silt on Monday.

Now, we are focusing on stabilizing the pH of the solution. Hooray!

Excavating the Garden; or, getting scared by a fussy weed whacker

The first few days have been an excavation. Grass has grown tall and weeds roam free in the six raised beds in the main garden. With trowels in hand, we eliminated the weeds and found a few nice surprises:  four heads of lettuce self seeded and grew within the weeds; soil and straw remnants of the potato towers that had been piled up in a corner of the garden actually fostered a new crop of potatoes that greeted us as we excavated; a row of raspberries put in by Jean and Tory grew despite the heavy competition from tall grasses.

While Jordan ripped through the six beds, Katie attempted to weed whack the grassland that had been cultivated by the slow, wet spring. However, a small black knob broke off the weed whacker and flew somewhere into the mysteries of the tall grass and so she ended up having to cut the lawn with scissors. Pruning shears, to be exact.

Fortunately, by the end of the day, the main garden was cleared and ready for planting. We were exhausted and spent the next day planting starts in the greenhouse. That way, the starts will stand a chance once we move them from greenhouse to the Brutal Outside World that is the unpredictable weather of Montana.

Hallo!

Last year, Jean Schwartz and Tory Elmore worked as Summer VISTAs on the Somers Middle School garden in Montana. During their term of service, they raised six beds, built a fence for the garden perimeter, built a treillis structure for the courtyard, and managed to produce about 400 pounds of food. Their experience is documented here. We, the volunteers for this summer, have a head start thanks to their hard work. Our goal is to make the garden a sustainable year long facility. This blog will serve as our journal. But who be we, the hardy workers this summer? Well...

Jordan Bryant graduated this spring with a Master's of Science in Human Nutrition & Foods from West Virginia University. She is interested in learning more about farm-to-school programs and local food systems in rural Montana. 

Katie Looney is a rising sophomore at New York University where she is majoring in Drama. She is fascinated by how geography influences culture and is excited to improve the health of Somers middle schoolers through sustainable agriculture.

While we are both Americorps Summer VISTAs (Volunteers In Service To America), Jordan is employed through Montana Campus Compact and Katie is employed through the Montana Prevention Resource Center. Because of this, Jordan's focus is on education while Katie's is on health, empowering them as co-workers to evolve the garden into a classroom that can be used even if it isn't growing season (which is quite short in Montana!) and a producer of local healthy organic food that will enrich Somers MIddle School's food service all year long.