The blackberries are ripening at the Cunniff school garden! Mmmm! We will be harvesting these in the coming weeks.

The three sisters garden is thriving at the Watertown MIddle School! Can you name the sisters? That's right, corn, beans, and squash!

The Hosmer garden is overflowing with plant life! The scarlet runner beans are climbing their trellis and creating a bean tunnel-so fun!

Week 1: On our first day Julia used a spade to dig a new hole in the Cunniff rain garden so that we could transplant several pussy willows there! Pussy willows are excellent for pollinators. The team planted both hybrid and native species!

The ACR garden team has learned how to sucker tomatoes! This is an important job since suckers draw the plant's energy away from the fruit to grow new branches instead. By suckering properly, the plant will bear more fruit! Here Olivia is gently suckering in the Cunniff garden.

Using a post driver is a safe and sure way to drive T-stakes deep into the ground. Here Evelyn uses one to create supports for the scarlet runner bean trellis at the Hosmer garden.

Week 2: Gardener Judy shows our summer interns how to add seed inoculant to the tiger eye beans for the Cunniff garden. Seed inoculant  Peas, beans, and other legumes help fix nitrogen into the soil. This not only helps the peas and beans grow but can help other plants later grow in that same spot. The kind of bacteria used for legume inoculants is Rhizobium leguminosarum, which is a nitrogen fixing bacteria. These bacteria “infect” the legumes growing in the soil and help the legumes to form the nitrogen fixing nodules that make peas and beans the nitrogen powerhouses they are.

Our first Garden Guest, Laurel Schwab visited the garden team at the Hosmer this past week! Laurel is a Senior Environmental Planner and Conservation Agent for the Town of Watertown. She has a decade of experience in environmental policy, climate change planning, and community development. She has spearheaded  the development of Watertown's Climate Action Plan, of which the ACR Summer Garden Program is a key component! The interns enjoyed hearing about the town's plan and also about Laurel's journey toward her current position as an environmental planner and climate superhero! 

Each day the interns meet, we open with an ice breaker, morning meeting and sit spots! What are sit spots you may wonder? One of the best ways to tune into the natural world is by spending time outdoors sitting in quiet awareness or by focusing in on a natural object, perhaps "seeing" it and its remarkable details for the first time with some effort. Sit spots allow us the time to observe and notice and wonder. These skills are crucial for those who wish to work in the garden or anywhere within the science field! Here Evelyn and Jayden are observing  and drawing some of the plants in the WMS garden!

Week 3: Katie Swan was our second garden guest this past week at the Hosmer! Katie is an Environmental Planner and Conservation Agent for the town of Watertown and has extensive experience working on water quality and climate resiliency.  Katie spoke with our crew about pollinator pathways and invasive species in Watertown.  She shared a new app that allows users to map the pollinator gardens in and around town. She also stayed and helped weed the (very) overgrown old Hosmer garden. Thank you, Katie!

This week the crew worked hard to weed, lay cardboard, and cover the paths with mulch to make the garden not only beautiful, but functional! Lila, Julia, and Jayden spent much of the day doing this hard work to make the WMS garden so much better! The crew also filled in the beds with more compost, and assembled the veg trugs like real pros! We will plant kale and maybe, beets in these in the coming weeks!

 We found a weed that fixes Nitrogen in the Cunniff Garden! In legumes and some other plants, the bacteria live in small growths on the roots called nodules. Within these nodules, nitrogen fixation is done by the bacteria, and the NH3 they produce is absorbed by the plant. Nitrogen fixation by legumes is a partnership between a bacterium and a plant.

Week 4: This week we met Melinda, from the Watertown Community Gardens. Last year, she planted one of the bump-outs near Hosmer school with a variety of native pollinator plants, and boy is it thriving! The Goldenrod has grown too big for it's spot-and the ACR interns had the opportunity to dig some up and transplant it in the old Hosmer garden! Here Evelyn and Daniel are using shovels to pry the plants from their spot in the bump-out.

At Hosmer school the corn has begun to tassel in the three sisters garden! Since there is a limited number of corn in the Hosmer garden, there is less chance that the wind can do the job of pollinating. You can improve pollination by transferring pollen from tassels to silks yourself. Judy showed our interns how to take a tassel from the corn plant and hand pollinate the corn silks that have started to appear.

One of the skills that the interns are building is  scientific knowledge about plants and pollination. So, how does pollination work? Pollen from a flower’s anthers (the male part of the plant) rubs or drops onto a pollinator. The pollinator then take this pollen to another flower, where the pollen sticks to the stigma (the female part). The fertilized flower later yields fruit and seeds. Here, Miriam and Evelyn are breaking open marigold flowers to discover newly formed seeds!

Week 5: On Tuesday, August 8th, Mike Micieli, tree warden for Watertown, was our garden guest! We did a walking tour around the Hosmer gardens and schoolyards and learned all about trees and what being a tree warden entails. Thank you, Mike for sharing your infinite knowledge about forestry and trees with our ACR Garden Team!

We also learned about sexual propagation (the union of the pollen and egg, drawing from the genes of two parents to create a new, third individual) and asexual propagation (taking a part of one parent plant and causing it to regenerate itself into a new plant) in the Hosmer science room this week. Did you know you can root clippings in both water and soil and create a clone of the original plant? To learn more about asexual and sexual plant propagation click here.

On August 9th, we met Sally Young and Liz Helfer who helped the team learn about nature journaling. We began with some simple drawing exercises and progressed to detailed drawings of many of the plants growing in the Hosmer learning garden. Thank you, Sally and Liz for sharing your expertise with our team! We also harvested Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, Calypso beans (Mmm! ) and planted a native variety of trumpet vine together.