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Thursday, June 9, 2011

End of the Year is Here

Is it really the end of the 2010-11 school year? Wow, this year has flown by but not without creating many memories that will be remembered for years to come. I know I can speak for Kate, Jim, and myself when saying that we will never forget our time at the Ecohouse and all of the knowledge we have soaked up while living there this year. Luckily for me, I will be back for another exciting year in the Fall!

So you might be wondering what we have been up to at the Ecohouse this quarter, and the answer is gardening! The three of us have never grown a garden on our own, so it has been a learning experience trying to start seedlings this year and keep them alive, but we succeeded! In this post you will find lots of pictures documenting our adventure over the last ten weeks. It was amazing to me how fast the seedlings would grow in just one week. We grew cucumbers, green lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, basil, oregano, spinach, onions, carrots, broccoli….and the list goes on and on! 

Starting the seedlings




The seedlings start to come to life

After just a few days the Dragon beans are sprouting like crazy!
My favorite growing experience was starting Dragon Tongue Bean seedlings. Jim and I decided that these must be the beans from the fable “Jack and the Bean Stalk,” because they grew like magic! Once I started all of the seedlings, I covered them in plastic wrap and put them on top of our refrigerator to wait for sprouting. Only a few days after planting these “magic beans,” they were sprouting half an inch! Within a week we needed to transplant them because they were too big for their containers while the other seedlings were just starting to develop. These beans are purple with a hint of green and are of the bush bean variety. The pictures tell the story!

They're magic beans!

Kylie and Mary planting lettuce

Tilling the garden the ole' fashioned way
We ran into a few bumps along the road in our gardening journey, starting with the rain. We all know the saying “April showers bring May flowers,” but I didn’t realize that literally meant the ENTIRE month continuing into May. This was one of the rainiest Springs Southeastern Ohio has seen in a long time. While it was frustrating not being able to use the Rota-tiller on our garden due to the high volumes of rain, we persevered and managed to find a couple days where it was dry enough to get the ground ready. 

Unfortunately, those days were not ones that we had the Rota-tiller available, so we decided to garden the old-fashioned way with rakes, hoes, and shovels. One thing I quickly learned: Gardening is not for the weak minded! It takes a lot of dedication and back-breaking labor to get a garden ready, but I found the experience to be completely fulfilling and rewarding. It is a great feeling to be self-sufficient and able to create conditions for living things to come to life.  

My grandparents lived through The Depression, and they had to live off the land in order to survive. They knew how to garden, reuse, and save in every way possible to live and feed their eight kids. I’ve heard many people today say that the older generation that lived through The Depression would be the people to survive today if a major catastrophe happened.  More and more, people are relying on technology to do things for them and we are losing basic survival skills like those needed during The Depression.

Jim glistening in the sun from workin' hard
 People are in such a hurry and so “busy” today that they don’t have time to garden. Instead, we buy food transported from thousands of miles away, grown in locations we don’t know, in conditions of which we are not aware. I don’t know about you, but I want to know what is in the food that I am putting into my body. I want to know that I am not eating genetically modified vegetables covered in chemicals and pesticides, grown in synthetic petroleum-based fertilizers. 

Why don’t we care about these things anymore? Personally, I never used to care about these issues because I was not aware that they were issues in the first place. I never gave a thought to what I was eating because I was never educated about the dangers of pesticides and big agriculture. We need to work these issues into more conversations because if people knew the truth about their food, more people would be on board with the organic/ DIY gardening movement.

While Jim and I focused our eco-hours on tending to the garden this quarter, Kate was busy working on food issues from a different aspect. She challenged herself this quarter to only buy and eat locally for a month, while posting her triumphs and tribulations on her own blog site. We talked weekly about her progress at our eco-meeting, and from her stories I could tell that this was an enlightening experiment. She found that the line was often blurred between buying local and getting food that was actually produced locally. When in the local health food store The Farmacy, she found herself conflicted about buying locally sold guacamole when she knew that the avocados were not actually grown locally. While she felt good about contributing to the local economy, she decided that eating seasonally and eating food produced locally is more sustainable than just buying locally.

Spring quarter brought everything to life at the Ecohouse, and I am sad to see my roommates leave but am excited for them as they are both off to California for their next exciting adventures in the world of eco-mindedness! Jim just recently earned an AmeriCorps position working for Return of the Natives and Kate will be doing environmental web-based work before heading to Spain for the year. As for me, I am off to compete for the title of Miss Ohio this week and hopefully having the opportunity to share the great things Ohio University and the Ecohouse has to offer to the entire state. On that note, have a great summer and keep on keepin’ it green until next school year!

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