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.