There will be life

     Welcome back everyone! I will be the garden manager for this school year. This year I plan on working more closely with Dr. Gendelman’s UNI class during the Fall so that the garden can be well prepared for spring. My goal for next semester is to maximize the garden’s productivity for spring and summer students with apartments and grocery bills. This means getting things growing as early as possible, preparing the sprinkler system for summer’s heat, and of course enjoying the outdoors!

Lovely crops of apples and pears this year. Unfortunately, this isn't a fig year.

A little Puget Sound gumweed. The seed fell from one of Dr. Bode's Grasslands Project plans when he was housing them in the greenhouse over the summer.

     As summer winds down, the perennials get a break from the heat and the annuals finish up their flowering. The surviving grape and kiwis weren’t on the sprinkler system during the summer, causing most of their leaves to brown and wither. During my field ecology class, when we were talking about the Pacific Northwest’s flavor of climate change, the learning garden’s kiwis came to mind as an analogy.

Only one of them appears to have survived, most of her leaves are completely dead, the stem appears browned, the plant’s growth has been stunted. But on the tips of some of her lateral stems are five leaves, as green as a cotyledon’s dorsal surface. These leaves must be fresh, perhaps three weeks old! They are a testament to how nature can survive here in one form or another, even through drastic climate changes. Western Washington’s fires may be more frequent, moist-loving plants may retreat north to British Columbia, western hemlock may lose more needles, and big leaf maples may droop towards the end of August, but there will be life.  

Grandpa parsley

Chamomile

    Exhibit B is the herb population. All the mint, sage, rosemary, and chamomile look like their jumping out of their beds. The two-year-old parsley’s seed heads appear to shove their faces into yours, as if to say “My children are everywhere now, whatcha gonna do about it?” Sorrel is making happy green bunches in each of the beds, a stray anise sits in the middle of a walkway, and I found a hidden French lavender that I completely forgot about. There’s a lot going on here, and most of it smells amazing.

    On our list of things to do is to harvest herbs and friends, clean up, and prepare for the next round of crops. So Let’s work as hard as our little garden does to keep this place flourishing and have lots of fun along the way!

These were planted in early August when I visited campus from expired seeds. Only carrots, radishes, and a couple beets actually sprouted. At least the carrots will ripen enough to be useful.