Browsing Archive: March, 2009
Posted by Tayler Cox on Tuesday, March 31, 2009,
March 24th, 2009 Those pine logs look small but they are deadly heavy. I had to recruit some extra muscle to create the border for the garden, and it reminded me that gardening is often fundamentally a community endeavor. Part of the gardeners job is to figure out social tactics to get people outside moving dirt around. If you've ever tried to get your friends to do this on their weekend, you'll know that they might not respond with great enthusiasm. I've developed several tactics to drum...
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Posted by Tayler Cox on Tuesday, March 31, 2009,
March 18th, 2009 We've started to analyze different soil samples from gardens around campus to see how we check out in terms soil life and nutrient content. This sounds fancy, but practically from my end this has involved a lot of shakin' test tubes with chemicals and small pieces of soil (see impressive science-in-action photo below). After I do my part, it goes off into this magical machine that spits back concentrations of different compounds. We'll get the numbers together in a couple ...
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Posted by Tayler Cox on Monday, March 30, 2009,
March 13th, 2009 New stuff to work with! Stanford Campus Grounds was very generous and delivered a minced Italian stone pine tree to our backyard dumping spot formerly known as a volleyball court. It will make a great border around the garden, which is much needed because a lot of people have been stepping all over it on the way from the parking lot to Hamm.
The best part of this project is trying to find materials for free, there's a lot out there if you scour Craig's list and email enough t...
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Posted by Tayler Cox on Monday, March 30, 2009,
March 8th, 2009 William came over a couple of weekends ago to show us how to prune our trees, it's much more involved than I thought. He follows the new school of pruning philosophy, I'm not sure what the old one is but this one seemed to work well for our trees. Key points:
- Only cut at nodes where the branches split, cut above the tree collar (the wrinkly part at the node) and it will heal faster
- Spray your tools! Make sure to disinfect tools to avoid spreading disease between trees.
- Wai...
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