An October Apple Tasting!

Greetings! This Wednesday in the Learning Garden we did an Apple tasting of seven varieties of Apples, 5 of which were varieties that grow here in Western Washington and 2 varieties from Eastern Washington. We were taste testing to see which varieties were the ones we would want to grow in our potential orchard. Among the varieties we taste tested were: Fuji, Akane, Gala, Williams Pride, and Jonagold.   All  those grow well here in our coastal climate. We also taste tested Honey Crisp and Golden Delicious which are varieties that grow better east of the mountains. Our data revealed that Fuji was almost everyone's favorite and interestingly enough we have planted one apple tree and it is a Fuji. The Fuji is a wonderful apple; it was developed in Fujisaki, Aomori Japan in  the 1930's and brought to the USA in 1969. It is a cross between the Red Delicious and the Virginia Ralls Genet.
It is naturally on the large size, very crisp and sweet and keeps well. Along with our apples we cleansed our palates with local cheddar goat cheese and some Lattin's Apple Cider .

 Then we got to work spreading some mulch!

Thank You to all the volunteers that are making the Learning Garden such a growing place.
Check in with us next Wednesday when we remineralize the Learning Garden and taste more varieties of apples!

Garden Party September 19, 2012

A huge thanks to everyone who came by and worked with us!

 Here we have some FYS students transplanting Tatsoi and Chard into gallon pots to go into the greenhouse for winter greens. This week's workshop was very productive. We worked in teams and accomplished at least 18 person hours of work. We completed almost half of a forty hour work week in two hours. Now that's people power in action! There were 3 teams, team 1 worked on transplanting, team 2 worked on Ivy removal, team 3 worked on moving the Raspberry Canes. Everyone did an amazing job.  

After all that hard work we took a break and tasted and prepared a variety of greens, Kale, Arugula, Chard, Mustard, and Beet greens. A little toasted sesame oil and soy sauce with ginger and garlic very tasty and so good for you! Keep posted to see how things are growing in the greenhouse and where did those Raspberry Canes go?



Recipe for Green Beans Almondine

Green Beans Almondine

2 pounds Green Beans stem ends removed snapped in half
1 cup or less slivered or chopped Almonds
4 Tablespoons butter
3 cloves of garlic

steam the beans first just until tender
melt the butter
add almonds and garlic
Toss in the steamed beans Enjoy!!

Garden Party with Green Beans Almondine 9.12.12

Hello and thank you to everyone who stopped by to see the garden and eat green beans almondine, recipe to follow.. Many students dropped by and were not shy about trying the beans.

Wednesday Garden Parties

Join the garden party during our regular hours while the weather holds

Wednesdays 12-2pm

In the Learning Garden (just outside of the cafeteria)

bush beans growing

 This Wednesday (tomorrow) we will be transplanting heirloom lettuces, bunching onions and weeding. Lynn will be preparing a tasting of Green Beans Almondine with green beans from the garden. Come help out, learn about gardening with your hands and with your taste buds

flowers in the squash

Upcoming workshops in October:

• Adding Minerals to our PNW soils. what minerals? what benefits?
• Making an earth worm bin ( With Rebeca Potasnik )
• Managing raspberries
• Mulching

Greetings from the Learning Garden at SMU

I would like to introduce myself my name is Lynn Villella and I have been organic gardening for a few decades. I learned it from my Italian father who learned it from his relatives and J. I. Rodale Press publisher of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine to which we had a subscription. I was and avid reader and gardener from an early age. I have been working with students and faculty for one season in the Learning Garden and have pictures to share with you. The workshop on Wednesday September 5, 2012 went well

above you see our ingredients are assembled for our Fried Stuffed Squash Blossoms (recipe to follow) Squash plants often make more flowers then  they need to make plenty of squash and the male flowers are very prolific, both types of flowers are great for stuffing. I also stuffed some lettuce, mustard and arugula leaves dip in egg and fried in raw virgin Coconut oil absolutely the best oil for this type of cooking!

RECIPE

six or more squash blossoms
Important collect the blossoms in the morning they curl up as the day goes by. They can still be used after they have curled, but are harder to work with.

a dozen or so leaves from tender greens like Mustard, Arugula and Romaine Lettuce.

THE STUFFING:

6 ounces Creamy Goat Cheese split in 3 parts
2/3 cup Roasted Pine nuts 
2/3 cup Roasted Hazelnuts (with pelicles removed, skins rubbed off) chopped
2/3 cup Walnuts chopped
By hand or food processor
3 T spoons minced, fresh Garlic
Fresh Herbs! Basil, Parsley, Cilantro, Fennel whatever you have and whatever you like!
Mix one 3rd of the cheese and one Tablespoon Garlic with each kind of nut add herbs as you please.

3 or 4 fresh eggs whipped
Coconut oil for frying
salt and pepper to taste.

Put a teaspoon or so of stuffing into the blossom and fold petals over dip in egg and fry

if blossom has curled gently unfurl and then stuff, refurl, dip in egg and fry

simply wrap a leaf up (start at stem end) around a teaspoon of stuffing and dip in egg and fry.
Easy and delicious... Enjoy.

When we were done cooking we moved on to a little gardening we transplanted some Heirloom Lettuce plants into gallon pots to go into the greenhouse. I found some winter hardy bunching onions similar to scallions or green onions. also into the green house and a basil plant. We finally have the heat Basil loves plus the greenhouse boosts the heat factor.

My next workshop will be next Wednesday September 12, 2012 I will cook Green Beans Almondine. Please join me from Noon to 2:00

Wednesday, Sept 5 Garden Workshop and Party

We are getting that new roof up on the shed today hooray! This Wednesday, Lynn will bring the camp stove again and prepare fried stuffed squash blossoms for people to try between noon and 2:00pm. 

Cooking from the garden will be a part of the September series workshops. 

We also have lettuce starts for transplanting into gallon pots to put in the greenhouse as well as seed some lettuce directly into pots and into the greenhouse. 

fried squash blossoms

This will be great fun and delicious!! Lynn will have her books for plant Identification and garden questions too.

Next workshop is Wednesday, Sept. 5 from 12-2pm in the Learning Garden (located just outside of the dining hall by the outdoor tables)

Harvesting Green Beans

Greetings gardeners and food lovers alike, August brings the heat we need to make our crops ripen. We are enjoying a bounty of perfect green beans in the Saint Martins Learning Garden!!

Our first crop of green beans went to the Thurston County Food Bank!

August Harvest!

Students from American Seminar class will be harvesting potatoes and garlic in the garden tomorrow.

Lynn Villeilla will be leading the garden lesson and also boiling off some freshly dug potatoes for tasting. Come taste fresh potatoes with garlic and garden herbs as a side for your lunch!

Thursday, August 2, 12pm
In the Learning Garden (located just outside of the dining hall)

A snack in the SMU garden

delicious red berries

This is what was ripe in the garden today and made for a very good snack.

Wild Edibles for Pacific Northwest Gardens

The first three edible weeds that every PNW Garden can easily include are Chickweed Stellaria media, Dandelion Taraxacum officinale, and Wintercress also known as Shotweed Cardamine oligosperma. These three weeds are true guardians of the soil. They return and recycle nutrients back into the garden soil. They are succulent enough to be natural green manures. Their flowers, seeds and leaves attract pollinators and encourage birds and wild things to come to the garden. They can be fed to chickens and are easy to control. Most importantly they can be enlisted to compete with and help with keeping the less desirable weeds at bay. All of them provide food that is palatable and high in vitamins and minerals for both man and beast throughout the year.

Cardamine oliosperma is at its best in the winter. It is used like water cress. If you can keep track of the newly emerging basil rosettes they have better flavor. It is very tasty mixed with goat or cream cheese and put on toast or crackers or in a cucumber sandwich. This lovely plant is above ground during the colder wetter months providing a protective cover of green leaves to catch and slow the incessant rain here in the winter months preventing erosion of topsoil. When the soil dries out in the spring Wintercress goes to seed with amazing seed dispersal hence the name Shotweed. The plant dries up and disappears reappearing in the fall from self sowing.

Dandelions are deep rooted and draw minerals up to the top soil. Dandelions have been eaten for millennia. They can be found almost everywhere on the planet. In the PNW they grow primarily in the spring and fall or in areas that are irrigated in the summer. Try them sautéed in olive oil with garlic and then pile between two pieces of crusty Italian bread maybe a little Parmesan cheese hmm delish! Most important always remember Dandelions have only 1 flower per stalk! Lookout for other much less tasty cousins of the Dandelions that have similar flowers but the flower stalk branches and bifurcates.

Chickweed our beautiful Stellaria media star shaped flowers and succulent leaves. Chickweed will linger into the warmer months but disappears in the hottest part of summer in full sun. If you pull it twice a year it keeps pretty tame. The nice thing is, it is a fine green quite lettuce like, and good in omelets soups.

These plants augment the plants growing in the garden and provide early spring greens. It is also good knowing that you could leave your garden fallow for a year or two and come back to find it mostly full of edible plants.

by Lynn Villella

Heirloom Tomatoes

ripe in the garden

Food Summit

Sustainable South Sound is putting on the Food Summit.

"The goal of the Food Summit is to bring our community together to celebrate, network and develop an action plan for a safe, local and sustainable food system."

Read more about it here.

October 14 community potluck and activities are all FREE! The keynote speaker, Mark Winne is the author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture and Closing the Food Gap.

A New Service Program - Grow Gardens in Schools

Wondering what to do after you graduate next year? Take a look at this awesome new program. It's like Americorps but all about growing gardens.

"The vision for FoodCorps is to recruit young adults for a yearlong term of public service in school food systems. Once stationed, FoodCorps members will build Farm to School supply chains, expand food system and nutrition education programs, and build and tend school food gardens.

The ultimate goal of the organization is to increase the health and prosperity of vulnerable children while investing in the next generation of farmers and public health leaders."

This seems like a great opportunity to participate in the new garden revolution. And there are other perks too. Participants receive the following benefits:

A biweekly stipend totaling $15,000 for the year
Health insurance, if not covered under another policy
Child care, if necessary
Student loan forbearance
A $5,550 Education Award for past or future education
Career mentoring, professional development, and strong work experience

Garden Visitors

Garden Parties should always start with lunch in the sun.
for more pics go here

There was a new visitor squatting on the side of the shed - a wasp. She didn't bother us.

and another one, lounging on a mint leaf - a lady bug with no dots.

we built a trellis, planted some lettuce and weeded and fed the strawberries.

Thanks to Tanya from Bon Appetit for feeding us with iced tea and treats!!

for more pics go here

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Subscribing for a CSA share is a way to buy your veggies directly from the farmer. Most CSAs have a pick-up location where you can pick up your box of produce weekly. You sign up for a season and whatever is ripe and ready, arrives in your box on a set day of the week. You never know exactly what will show up. There is an element of surprise each time you open the box. Sometimes you get to try out something you've never had before.

Some things we like about CSAs are that they support local farmers; we get the freshest seasonal and local food; and less fuel is needed to transport the food since it goes directly from the local farm to a nearby pick-up site to our kitchens. It's good for us, the farmers and the environment.

The Sustainability Committee has been working with Bon Appétit and Full Circle Farm to set up a pick-up location for such a CSA on the SMU campus. Imagine being able to pick up a fresh box of organic, seasonal veggies while you're at school!

There are many CSA options in the area and you might pick one based on price, pick-up location, seasonal options, frequency of delivery, etc. Take a look here to see what farms are offering CSA shares near your home.

A few of us who live on Olympia's east side have been pretty happy with Rising River Farm's shares.

First Harvest!

This Wednesday, we sampled our first golden heirloom tomato and harvested a box of boc choy

Rosemary models the first pick

Tanya samples a tasty morsel

Amanda holds the crop of boc choy. It was split between all who showed up to the work party. A portion went home to the Thurston County Food Bank with the food bank volunteers who came to help us garden.

What's Growing on in the Learning Garden

The garden has finally begun producing enough goodies we were obliged to share. Last Wednesday our volunteers were able to sample the Learning Garden's first ripe tomato, and take some of our boc choy home with them.

This week we have started harvesting the radishes.

The tomatoes continue to tempt us, by looking delicious.

A curious phenomenon is taking over the strawberry patch. This is the last known picture of this one. *Yum.*

This unfortunate phenomenon seems also to have spread to the raspberry box...

The squash has begun to develop fruit.

The sunflowers and corn continue to climb skyward.

The broccoli we planted last week is doing well.

And the newest blueberry plant is flourishing, though I have no idea where all the ripe berries went...

So that's what's been growing on in the garden.

Thanks to everyone who have been following us here, on the blog, and volunteering your time to help paint, harvest, weed, water, and keep our garden looking beautiful.

Garden Update...

There has been a lot of gardening going on. As you can see from all the pictures that are posted on here we have been busy. With all the help from the volunteers we got this garden up and running. We have many different vegetables growing and fruit. One plant just grew the first berry over the weekend and I got the joy of eating it, but not before I took a picture of the raspberry. They seem to be having a hard time growing right now but after seeing that one berry I have faith that those raspberries will grow.

Another update is that we are now having deer or some other kind of animal come up to the garden and they seem to like the carrots and strawberries because that is the only bed that seems to have their foot prints. Looks like we are going to be needing to build a fence to keep them out. That is going to be the next project to come.

Garden Celebration and Blessing

See this article about the celebration in the Olympian.

Abbot Neal blesses the garden with holy water

President Heynderickx speaks

We eat a delicious cake made by Bon Appétit

Prof. Shawn Newman leads a ukulele sing along

Enjoying the garden

Watching it grow

We add our own wishes and blessings to the garden wall