Year TWO  ACR Garden Internship

On Wednesday the team worked hard with Liz Helfer and Judy Fallows to complete the final touches on the new garden shed! The interns added shelves and organizers for all of the garden tools! Nice work! 

After more than a week away from working in the Lowell garden, our team returned to flowering Scarlett Runner beans climbing over the trellis, tomatoes and husk cherries ripened and ready to be eaten!  It is always remarkable when you step back into the garden after a bit of a break and wonder at how the plants have flourished.

Hard to believe that our 6 week ACR summer garden program has already come to a close! We celebrated the end of our program eating kale salad, spreading husk cherry jam on bread, and caprese salad using produce we grew ourselves! We also watched The Biggest Little Farm, and film that demonstrates the Earth healing benefits of regenerative farming-in balance with nature.

Each day we meet we have a discussion related to sustainability and climate change or about how we can mitigate it's impact. Today we discussed climate change in broad terms, how is it affecting us? This great discussion led us to how dry it has been (up until this past week, anyway!). Our little pollinator garden has been struggling a bit this summer. Drier weather and compacted soil may be to blame. Judy instructed our interns on the use of a tool called a broad fork in an effort to help these important plants out! Broadforks are the best tool to use to aerate or prepare your garden because they reach deeper than other tools and till without mixing layers of soil. It is important to maintain your soil's layers because they each have specific, germinating purposes.  

We were thrilled to have Mike Micielli back again this year to share his seemingly unending knowledge about trees and their benefits! He joined us at the Hosmer School this week and he gave us a tour around campus. He helped our interns identify different trees and spoke about each one, its identifying attributes, and how climate change is affecting several species. We discussed why trees matter, and how trees help mitigate the impact of climate change. Mike is very thoughtful about which trees he chooses to plant where, making for a more diverse, very green, and also safe community in Watertown!

Black Earth compost was delivered earlier this spring for the new Lowell school garden. This past week, we finally managed to distribute the last of it to the location of the old Lowell school gardens. Plans are in the works to plant blackberries there again as well as other pollinator friendly plants. Compost both improves soil's ability to hold nutrients and delivers much-needed nutrients. It improves nutrient retention and then it delivers needed food for the plants in the form of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. This week was our first really wet one of the summer, and the plants are pleased! Scarlet runner beans are running up trellises and the tomatoes, dill and pumpkins are thriving! 

This week our crew were privileged to be joined by Emilia Dick Fiora del Fabro of The Charles River Watershed Association. She identified many native and invasive and some edible plants growing along the Charles River banks. We discussed the honorable harvest (Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer) and definitions of invasive, naturalized, and native plants. She shared the history of the dam, its impact on the species living in the river and the impact on the Nipmuc people, who once depended upon the fish that swam upstream in Natick and Sudbury. The CRWA is campaigning to remove the dam and restore the river to is former state.

At the middle school this week, we cleared weeds from the pollinator garden, attended to the maze of tomatoes, planted sugar snap peas and helped Elizabeth Helfer construct our new garden shed! We also took a tour of the Edenfield Avenue rain gardens, and discussed how the rain gardens offer a natural filtration of the runoff from the street, making it cleaner before entering the Charles River. We also noticed some residents planting garden plants along the streets and discussed how contaminants may affect any produce from such plants and may not be safe!

Pam Phillips, of Friends of Bees was our garden guest this week at the Hosmer School Garden.  She shared in depth information about the most common bees living and pollinating in Watertown. She also led our crew on a bee safari, identifying at least 4 different species. We woke some bees up from a nap inside squash flowers, too! Thank you, Pam! We also gated closed the pumpkins and sunflowers so the bunnies don't eat our baby seedlings!

@ Hosmer we weeded (A LOT!), we top dressed the trees, kiwis, and trumpet vine with compost. We continued to tie up and prune tomatoes, staked the peppers, planted beans, pumpkins and dill and potatoes, and more! Bunny fencing was started in hopes that those bunnies will leave our new seedlings be!

@WMS we had our first garden guests, Sally Young and Liz Helfer who helped us improve our botanical drawings with specific exercises such as blind contour drawing to help us see the shapes! We also weeded most of the pollinator garden and tackled tying and pruning the tomatoes there. We also identified where those ground wasps were living and marked it off to prevent more stings!

@Lowell, we put up bunny fencing to protect the beans and pumpkins. We also planted dill and sunflower seeds. We also top dressed the apple trees and moved much of the compost to the location of the old garden. Shelves were assembled and tools were organized! Yay! We also had a GREAT discussion about waste management and the 12+ Rs of the circular economy and watched The Story of Stuff!

This week was a hot one! We started our work outside, then took our learning indoors. At WMS we identified the key parts of a plant and discussed plant reproduction types. We also suckered and tied up tomatoes and weeded out the very overgrown kale plants that had gone to seed.

At the Cunniff school garden we planted New England Pie pumpkins, weeded, dug a hole to reveal the stones beneath the garden beds, suckered and tied up tomatoes, and discovered some volunteer garlic! We also harvet sugar snap peas to plant this Fall!

At the Lowell school garden we started outside, planting tiger eye beans and sunflowers. When the heat got too strong, we went inside and learned about winter sowing. We repotted several native plants that Gardener Judy had sowed this winter! Winter sowing allows many native plants with thick seed coats to go through a freeze/thaw cycle aiding in germination.

Our first day of this year's summer internship was filled with activity! Our amazing interns learned how to water in 3 of our 4 gardens! We complete a daily garden size up and observe what needs each garden has. Today we got to know each other better, planted Scarlett runner beans, weeded, learned how to sucker tomatoes, and identified several edible weeds!

On our second day we visited the Hosmer school garden. It has been quite dry, and the soil was thirsty! Again, the interns learned watering techniques and gave the garden a thorough dousing! We also harvested coriander seeds, weeded (A LOT) and transplanted some native pollinator plants including Blue Vervain!

Each of the school gardens, with the exception of the Middle school, has its own set of tools that are kept securely in cedar sheds. The middle school shed will arrive and be assembled this summer! Shelves, totes, and tools stay organized and safe inside each shed. Interns installed a manual pencil sharpener at the Lowell garden this week! We also planted beans and cucumbers and installed the very necessary, bunny fencing.