SIFE: Community Garden Blog
We’ve Started Our Garden!
May 18, 2010
Welcome to the blog for the Cornell College community garden in Mount Vernon, Iowa! This community garden is a project of the Cornell College SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) team, and it is completely student run and student organized. We hope that this garden will help bring together the students and residents of the Mount Vernon community, while also spreading the word about sustainable gardening practices. We plan to start small, so we are only going to plant a few different vegetables this first summer. We are hoping to sell what we produce this Summer as a way to generate interest in and revenue for our project. After Winter 2010/11, we hope to break our land up in to multiple plots which we will make available to the community!
We are creating this garden because we see a need in our community for healthy, fresh and affordable produce. We hope that this garden will become a place for the community to gather, share experiences and bond. We’ve already met many of our neighbors, and they wholeheartedly support our project (one of them even gave us work gloves and bug spray, two things that are really going to come in handy this summer!). We’re all really excited to get this project off the ground, and we can’t wait to start seeing results!
Here are some before pictures to get you all excited about our project:
July 29, 2010
Hi everyone!
This has been a rather hectic summer, and it has been difficult for us to keep up with our blog postings, as you can probably tell. That doesn’t mean that our garden hasn’t been flourishing, though, because it has! Everything was planted at the beginning of June and by now the plants are huge. Our pumpkins and gourds are doing well, and every day they get bigger and bigger. Our peas haven’t been doing so well in the high heat that we’ve been having, but hopefully as the heat of the summer starts to wind down they will start to perk up again.
As some of you know we had a little trouble with the black walnut trees that surround our garden. Black walnut trees are poisonous to many different types of plants and they kill the plants rather quickly once they're planted. Sadly, this means that we weren’t able to plant a summer staple in our back garden: tomatoes (though, thankfully, the pumpkins and gourds that we've planted seem to be resistant to the black walnut's poison). How did we solve this dilemma? We planted tomatoes on the front porch! We currently have 4 pots of tomatoes on the front steps of Kramer house, and they are growing quickly in the full sun. Below is a picture of our first tomato, and there are many more where that came from!
As school gets closer and closer, we are all excited to hit the ground running with our next year's worth of SIFE projects. Now that everything has calmed down and we get closer and closer to harvesting we will make sure to keep you all updated on our garden project.
July 31, 2010
Just a quick update today, guys. We are going to be meeting with Courtenay Baker-Olinger next week because she is going to be writing about our garden for the next Berry Center E-Newsletter, so keep an eye out for that! Hopefully it’ll be an opportunity for even more people to hear about our garden, and there should be some pretty sweet pictures too.
The exciting announcement for today is that overnight the pumpkins have started to flower! This means that any day now we should start getting little baby pumpkins, and then things will really (hopefully) start to snowball. It’s really exciting for us to start seeing the fruits (or vegetables?) of our labor, and we’ve included some more pictures so that you guys can see the transformation too!
PS: Happy (almost) August!
Our little garden is getting so big!
One of our pumpkin plants, that little flower is hopefully going to turn into a big pumpkin!