Garden Volunteers Prepare for Earth Week

The Community Garden is in full swing this season with a new temporary fence and a wildlife camera, with more improvements on the way! Such as a new shed, compost facility, fountain, wooden plant containers, a stylish art-project fence, and possibly even a small fish pond!  The garden is looking for volunteers to spend time out in the beautiful weather planting fresh plants, watering newly planted ones, and share ideas about the new improvements!

During Earth Week at Elon, the Elon Community Garden is hosting garden days at regular times!

Stop by:

Sunday, April 17th from  3-5pm

Wednesday, April 20th from 4-6pm

Hope to see you there!

Visit to Wake Forest University Community Garden

Around 1:00 PM on Monday, January 31, we will leave Elon and at 2:00 PM we will be meeting with the Campus Kitchen coordinator at the Wake Forest University Community Garden to hear about how the two programs are working together and to get a tour of the garden. Please RSVP to smarcus@elon.edu if you are interested!

Get ready for an awesome season!

A group of Elon students and faculty/staff met today over lunch to discuss plans for the garden in the winter and upcoming spring term.  We are going to allocate some of the harvest for use in college coffee, starting at the beginning of April, but this depends on how well the harvest is this season.  Lately, the Elon community garden has been the rabbit, grey fox, woodchuck, and squirrel community garden, as just about everything we attempted to plant during the fall has been immediately chomped into nonexistence.  This brought up the fencing plan.  We have grant money to construct a fence to keep the critters out, and the goal is to construct a temporary fence during the first workday.  This will protect any new plants and give us time to build a sturdy, high, and below ground fence.  There is talk that the new fence will be a form of eco-art designed by an eco-art class, which will likely a semester-long project.  The beginning of March we are going to begin starting seeds in the engineering greenhouse so we can transplant them to the garden when the weather is better and the time is right.

We are planning a small field trip on Monday, Jan. 31 in the afternoon to the Wake Forest Community Garden, where they have a nice fence and a more developed campus kitchen-community garden relationship that we can learn from and apply to our own garden.

Students will be needed to help with the seeding, and attend the Feb 12? workday to help build the temporary fence.  As far as the new greenhouse that the garden received as a gift, we are hesitant about putting it up because the glass paneling is a liability.  We could replace the glass paneling with polycarbonate, but that is expensive and hard to get funding for.  If a Sustainable Initiative Fund is passed by SGA, this could fund the new panels for the greenhouse, and things like a more effective fence.   But, it is a more permanent type of structure, and we don’t know with the possibility of a future new location of ENS center, if that means a new location for the garden. It seems at the moment, a small temporary hoop house with plastic covering will be the only option if anything, as it is less expensive and not permanent.

A post with scheduling and workday details will be posted soon.  Get ready for an awesome season!

November 2010 Newsletter

Hey Everyone,
Here is the newsletter for November including the new workday schedule. Thank you all for helping make Fall Harvest a huge success this year!
~Sarah Marcus

Fall Harvest Fun!

Students enjoyed free food, a pumpkin carving contest featuring our own pumpkins, and fun games at the Annual Fall Harvest Festival this Friday!  Molly and Jenny were the winners of the pumpkin carving contest and received ten dollar gift certificates to Target!

Planning on Installing a Fence

It seems the rabbit is the only one getting any food from the garden, as most of newly planted greens have been eaten completely, despite the efforts to catch the rabbit or prevent it from eating.  Our only option seems to be to build a fence around the garden to prevent the rabbit from getting in, and we are currently in the process of getting the funding.  We will probably install the fence ourselves, so if you want to volunteer, come to the garden workdays once we get the green light to start building.

Goals for Saturday’s Workday!

Planting seeds (if we can get into the truitt center):

• Sprinkle 1/3 of the blue cup of fish meal over the row we started. Fish meal is in a tan bag in the plastic bin in the shed
• Shovel as much compost as you can get out of the black composter onto the row
• Re-cultivate briefly to mix in the fish meal and compost with the soil.
• Sprinkle seeds lightly (kale, and spinach if you run out of kale) over the row, seeds should be 1-2 inches apart
• Massage them into the ground so they are covered

Planting plants

• Broccoli goes in the row closest to powell house (next to the amaranth)
• Dig small holes and place 1 plant in each hole, bury the stem as much as possible so the first leaf is about 1/2 inch above ground
• Cabbage and collards can go in the other two rows, in whichever order we decide

Rabbit prevention

• Use the green wire fencing near the shed and behind the big gray fan thing to construct some sort of barrier (like a triangle over the top of the row) use the wooden stakes and the hammer if necessary
• This is to rabbit-proof the row
• ***If we can’t find a way to do this, or if we need more supplies, we hold off on planting the plants until tuesday so we can find more supplies**

Watering

• Water everything you plant, as soon as you plant it and before you leave for the day

Housekeeping

• Clear out any dead plants or parts of plants anywhere in the main part of the garden
• Start trying to get rid of the grass in the walkways, especially in the herb garden
• Feel free to harvest whatever you would like to take home

Rabbit Strikes Again!

WANTED

The newly planted broccoli and collard greens were devesated the other day after yet another attack on our garden by the sneaky rabbit.  We stocked the bunny rabbit catchers with a different bait, hamster feed, as a last ditch effort to save our plants.  If we don’t catch him soon, we will resort to putting up small fencing around the plants.  If you see a silly looking rabbit with droopy ears around campus, send an email to somebody in the garden committee ASAP.

Elon 101 Helps Out With Garden!

Students Scott and Tyler From Elon 101: Sustainability

Professor Strickland’s sustainability themed Elon 101 class met Tuesday, September 7th to help get the garden ready for planting this season. Students got excited about watering and plowing the soil where there are soon to be new broccoli plants and collard greens.

Elon 101 TA, Jenny

Newly Organized Tool Shed!

All of the tools have been washed off and organized in the tool shed in preparation for the new planting season!