Hello everyone! We have received our second garden tower!! It came in three parts, as pictured below, and will likely be assembled at one of our Challenge residences as there is not enough room for it here. How sad to see it leave but how exciting to know it will be helpful in another building! We will likely keep it in the boxes until we know where it's going and send it along with a full bag of soil. We are very appreciative of the City of Whitehorse, through the Environmental Grant, for funding the second garden tower! We could not have purchased the second one without their support. On Friday we received our garlic order - oodles of hard and soft neck garlic to be grown in our first tower. It has been stored somewhere dark and cool for the time being. On Monday our gals planted four cloves of each type of garlic, root down, in our tower. They have been labelled on the tower so we can water and care for them appropriately. We will be scattering the rest of our plants, throughout the tower, as well to ensure best growing for all of them. The girls did some research on how to properly grow garlic, and will likely do the same for the rest of the seeds, in a tower. Today we received our first full seed order! We got our fun stuff like cilantro and beets from West Coast Seeds. How amazingly quick they are! Tomorrow we will start planting!
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Today we finalized our seed orders with West Coast Seeds and Salt Spring Seeds (links below)! We are excited to have some seeds on the way. Today we also put half of our vermicomposting worms in to our tower so they can get a head start before the seeds come. We also gave them a healthy dose of food for the next little while and watered our soil again as it's not quite as wet as we need it to be. Our little red wigglers (the worm species best for this process) take any compost we dump in to the tower's centre console and digest the nutrients, while spreading them throughout the tower. This process allows us to reduce our environmental footprint, put some wigglers to work and get some very healthy plants! Also... a little bird mentioned that our second tower might be hopping on a plane soon... Wanna know why you should vermicompost? Check out the video below! Links to seed websites: www.westcoastseeds.com/ AND www.saltspringseeds.com/ Hi there everyone!
On Friday, our awesome program gals and our job coach, Catheryne, spent a few hours today going through seed options and picking which awesome food we want to grow! We have had requests from our other departments for radishes and herbs. Some of the seeds chosen by our program gals were lettuce, beets and spinach and the experimental seed of cantaloupe! The girls did well at picking things that can be shared with our kitchen and coworkers once things start sprouting. Catheryne will be ordering seeds today, Monday November 21, to get things going in our awesome tower. There are so many amazing resources for projects such as this so we will be connecting with West Coast Seeds to try out for their seed donation opportunity. If you are starting a project of your own, here is the link to the page that holds the donation application form: www.westcoastseeds.com/seed-donations/ We have a TOWER!!!! This morning our lovely worker bees assembled the tower and filled it with soil. The process today started as filling one section with soil, watering it, then adding the next level. However, this quickly changed to adding a section, adding soil and repeating, then watering several sections at once. The girls did the bottom half, then the top half to make it slightly easier to manage. The whole process took about 2 and a half hours so we could make sure that we did everything right and fully watered the tower. We used about 20 watering cans worth of water (pictured below) for the whole thing so hopefully it's nicely saturated now! And.... we only used one bag of pre-mixed starter soil! Some instructions for assembling your own garden tower, which also has pictures, can be accessed by clicking this link: gardentowerproject.com/resources/garden-tower-instructions Aside from this, when using a bit of extra soil from a different container, we found the mouse friend of ours who has been living in the nice, warm dirt. We shall be relocating him soon as he will eat our plants, should he stay with us. We chatted with our woodshop associates who have agreed to help us set up the grow lights... more to come in this aspect! We have had so many questions and inquiries about our tower already! It is situated in our staff room due to space constraints and we have given many descriptions regarding the purpose of the tower. We have also offered each of our departments the opportunity to pick some seeds for the tower, once we start planting. We have a wide variety of requests from herbs such as dill and cilantro to favourite veggies such as radishes. We are incredibly excited to start growing soon! This afternoon, we pick and order seeds! Hello again! Week two... Last week we did a bit more on the tower by adding some more rungs and putting in our irrigation pipes. The pipes have simply been secured with a large zip tie. We also put the hoses through the pipes. This involved some cutting and hands on work which we fortunately had help with. Our trusty WoodShop guys had the tools and precision we needed to complete this part of the job. We were lucky enough that the crew from Saskatchewan cut notches in to the different segments to allow the irrigation pipes to fit nicely, although you may have to request this if starting a garden tower yourself. Today we picked up dirt to fill our first tower with while we navigate where to put it in our teeny little classroom space. We picked up three large bags of pre-mixed soil to make double sure that we don't run out. It has been a fun experiment so far and the girls working here seem to enjoy the challenge. Soil coming soon! Yay! We finally got our first Garden Tower 2 shipped to us! It arrived on November 8th and we have started putting it together. First things first. We started by unpacking all three boxes, checking out all the elements of our future garden. There was the Garden Tower 2, three grow lights and a brand new irrigation system. We began putting together the base of the tower as we watched the tutorial videos online and installed the caster wheels, so we can move the tower around when needed. You may find the tutorial videos here: How to assemble the Garden Tower 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyQIGX-53PY Garden Tower 2 Caster Kit Installation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_xbaP0OLI |
about usWe are part of the Employ Ability Skills Program with Challenge Disability Resource Group. We take part in a 12-week program that allows us to learn new skills and foster our interest in growing our own food organically. Archives
August 2017
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