The Campus Garden Initiative

April 25th, 2009

As proclaimed by me, one of the organizers, the Stanford Garden Tour rocked! We had lots of people come out to see the gardens and a big potluck at the Community Farm after to celebrate.  A special treat at Hamm was Rodney Perdew, who brough up some moringa trees and told us a bit about the miracle tree (more on these later) and Brian Bower who gave a tour of the trees he planted at Hamm back in 2000.  More pictures to come!

A friend who saw it at the Stanford Cool Product Expo told me about it, and from the website it sounds awesome!  This beats running outside every hour to take a picture of the garden so I can figure out how much sunlight each spot gets.

http://easybloom.com/

The first day of class was enrolled beyond capacity. It was really exciting to see all the people from around campus interested in gardens, and from all types of academic backgrounds.    Took some snaps of the farm and class, Sarah and community plot holders have made a lot of improvements in just the short time she's been here this year.

March 30th, 2009 - I saw something that warmed my heart today, at least six people from Hammarskjold all out in the garden working together.  How glorious! It's really fun when we are all out there digging and watering and building.  I think the occasion arose from the combination serendipity of no one having work yet from classes combined with the nice weather. 

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 up excitement.  First you start with the lead in,"Hey, I know you really wanted to drive up to SF to watch that movie and try out that great new restaurant, but you know what would be even better? (at this point you are building the anticipation and excitement) "How about instead helping me lead an environmental revolution in my backyard while simultaneously learning about exotic and native wildlife?"  I've had mixed success with this, if anyone reading this knows of anything particularly effective, I'm always taking suggestions.

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 of weeks, but here's an overview of the different tests we're running:

• Cation Exchange Capacity

• Ammonium, Nitrate + Ntrite, and Ntrite alone

• Available/Extractable Phosphorus

• Soil pH

Ammonium and Nitrate is pretty cool because you divide the sample and measure at different time points (~one week apart) to see how productive the soil life has been in between measurements.  You only use about 10 grams of soil for the test, just about two pinches, for these samples. It's amazing to think how many soil creatures must fit into this small area in order to produce any detectable level of change.

We took samples from 19 different sites around campus, so it will be interesting to see how they compare with one another.

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 tree trimming companies. 

I didn't get the miner's lettuce for free though. All of a sudden I'm noticing all those places at the grocery store where they have "impulse buy" hot spots set up for garden starts.  It's like going to the pound every time I go to buy food now, and having cute little puppies staring at me from outside with big brown eyes that say "Take me home and love me!" except in this case it's actually potted cherry tomatoes. 

I also need to put blinders on next time I venture into Common Ground, our local, sustainable, non-profit garden store just a couple of blocks away in Palo Alto off El Camino.  What a wondrous array of mysterious seeds and books and starts! 

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.
• Wait to prune until trees are dormant (i.e. no leaves) and when you think it won't rain for awhile.  If the naked stems get wet after being pruned, they'll suck up any water that touches the tips, including pathogens in the water.
• Cut off dead and diseased branches.
• When you lop off a big branch, use the three cut method so that the weight of the branch doesn't pull off a big strip of bark when it falls off.  Cut once on the underside, then a couple of inches farther along the branch on the topside, when the branch breaks off it will make a clean break from the underside cut.
• Chop and drop! When you take off a branch, chop it into relatively small pieces and leave at the base of the tree, maintaining at least a 6 inch perimeter around the base (to avoid trapping moisture and disease).  The nutrients in the branch will eventually make it back to the tree, and it means less hauling around of organic matter after your done.

Pruning trees involves some serious feng-shui.  William made sure to stand back every couple of cuts and check out the shape of the tree and the direction of the branches.  He also suggested just spending a couple of minutes with the tree before pruning to get a sense of it. 

Also, on a more practical note, apparently the most pruning injuries happen while you are bored and chatting up a fellow gardner while taking off a branch. Those tools are sharp!  Future Hamm residents beware especially -  no workman's comp for our backyard project....

This entry actually pertains to last weekend's activities, that's the thing about blogging, I haven't figured out how to cheat on the date yet.

Still sheet mulching! Will actually start to grow something soon'ish.

Started to collect fallen leaves from around campus.  Since we weren't sure if some might be toxic, we collected from three different spots on campus that looked like they had a mix of different types of tree leaves.  Over by Roble there are mushrooms growing under the leaf cover near some trees.  I'd like to go back and collect some more soil and perhaps some of the mushrooms to get some mycelia in our soil. 

Cool fact about mycelia: they aid in nutrient exchange between plants so that plants cooperate rather than compete in a given ecosystem. 

The leaves themselves will double as compost and hopefully the ones already in the process of rotting will introduce some more life into our soil! We collected six full garbage bags but covered less than half the garden area, so we have our work cut out for us.

I found this cool keyhole garden design on the AfriGadget website.  This may be the next Hamm garden project....