Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

We started the day by checking the bird houses to make sure that the house sparrows and starlings weren't moving in. These two species of birds are not native to the United States and are responsible for taking nesting spots from our beneficial native birds. We were happy to see the nests of wrens, bluebirds and tree swallows. The bird box that Tamara built this spring was full of baby bluebirds almost ready to fledge! One box had a little mouse that didn't run away when we opened the box, so we let him stay.
      Today we also harvested the garlic. Garlic is harvested when it still has 5 green leaves. Each green leaf will become a paper "wrapper" that will protect the garlic while in storage. The aroma of it as we harvested made us all hungry for some good, garlicky food. It was layed out to dry for a few weeks.
      Other accomplishments for the day were; weeding the pumpkin patch, tilling the old galic beds, storing the dried Holy Basil, putting the oregano into the dehydrator to finish drying it and weeding the vegetable garden. At the end we all sampled some goat cheese and decided that we are going to do some cheese making this summer.                       -Celia

Looking Back:

"Sunscreen is your best friend" - Megan

"I love gardening because you get to eat stuff and smell stuff and there's lots of beetles and flowers that you can smell. I love sunflowers. It was really fun today. We got to pick garlic" - Trinity

"Allergies + beetles = a no-no" - Tamara

"Oregano wakes you up!" - Willie

"Sunburn is painful. Quite so" - Carly

"Carly and I would love to continue weeding tomorrow!" - Julia

"Meet me in the pumpkin patch Charlie Brown" - Karen

"The oregano is almost dry" - Colin

"I love you guys!!" - Celia


Megan, our new bird prodigy, ispects one of our 17 birdhouses


Tamara working hard


Willie, Carly and Julia weeding the veggies















A little mouse living in one of the bird houses
















The garlic harvest!!



















Edward and Jacob bringing up the garlic

No comments:

Post a Comment