Welcome to the sixth of November... or that's what last week felt like with the cold weather. This week's routine starts with the twirly roundabout thing. Our solo male greenhouse representative did a lot of work this week on watering the garden tower in the mornings and the greenhouse during the day. Speaking of the greenhouse, that's where we've been spending the majority of our time as greenhouse worker bees. The week started with planting more marigolds as some did not sprout, as well as seeds such as marjoram and frilly edible crysanthamum. Our secret planter started sewing some snap and snow peas this week as well. As usual, there was lots of watering which happened, as well as refilling the tank and the many, many jerry cans which live there. It's very peaceful, assuming you don't drop the jerry can in the water and cause a tidal wave which lands on your head! We watered the plants, the ground and ourselves. We also refilled the water tank for the volunteers who come up on the weekends. Thanks to the guy who lets us use his water (the man at Changing Gear)!! More work included transplanting what seemed like a thousand amaranth plants (or at least too many to count). Our ladies, Ang and our secret planter, spent the mornings filling trays and trays.... and trays................. and trays. We must have filled over thirty trays. Now the trays are ready for our extra helpers who will be coming up this afternoon to help speed things along. Some work this afternoon will include planting all of the sunflowers and MORE TRANSPLANTING!!! One of the funner things this week was harvesting some little baby radishes from the greenhouse... YUM!! Aside from regular greenhouse activities, our group participated in the AURORA learning styles workshop on Wednesday and Thursday which was hosted by Learning Disability Association Yukon (LDAY). Our secret planter also took a break from planting on Friday to provide some much needed help in the Challenge storefront. Thanks secret planter!! Thanks for tuning in and off we go to the greenhouse with our extra helpers!! Pictures next week will be much fuller, and so will our hands with all of the watering cans..... sooooo muuuuuuuch waterrrrrriiiiiing! If you ever need a new arm workout plan, stop by our greenhouse and help out.
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Friends of the greenhouse!! Thank you for joining us in the month of May! Thank you for all of your patience with our greenhouse postings as we have been in the process of closing out the last program with our lovely bloggers, starting a new program and getting our guys started in this new greenhouse time! We have three new participants who put greenhouse as their first choice and they have been being oriented to the greenhouse, the tools, Challenge and all of the other things that they manage on a daily basis. Right now, greenhouse work involves a LOT of planting and watering to make sure the plants for our city boxes are looking full and ready come planting time in June. We had a frost recently which led to losing some of our plants (sorry previous program peeps!) so have been discarding the plants who were not strong enough and replacing them with nice healthy sprouts. Production is in full swing now! For our garden towers.. they have been continuously growing and producing lovely plants. Right now we are watering to keep them healthy with our main focus being the city planter box items at the moment. Our new program guys have gotten in to the swing of greenhouse nice and quick and we're excited to initiate them to this site once they are more settled in here. Thanks for the loyal following (24 views this week!!!) and here's how things are looking around here these days.... I will say too, we missed you guys! Just a brief check in (check up) for today for the friends of the Challenge Greenhouse.
Sorry we have been absent for so long! We have been busy little bees. Three weeks ago our participants stayed on an extra week to help us get stuff planted once we finally got heat in to the greenhouse at Changing Gear. We had a handy dandy electric guy come and rework some of our wiring and now the heater is running like a dream. It is an average of a balmy 21 degrees Celsius up there! The team planted ALL of the pansies and amaranth for the planter boxes, as well as some spinach, marigolds, creeping thyme, some other herbs, calendula and many other lovely seedlings. The sprouts are at various stages with our amaranth soon needing to be transplanted in to larger containers and our baby herbs just starting to creep toward the sunlight. We are also having to rotate our amaranth occasionally as most of the sun is coming from the South and the little leaves are stretching to reach it. Aside from the greenhouse, we have been madly wrapping up our fiscal year which ended March 31 and prepping for our next program with a whole bunch of building and new materials for the classroom being put in place. What an amazing time! We had a brief week off, which is why we didn't post during the first week in April, and with the stats it has just been crazy town in our office! Thank you all for your patience. As we will be starting with our new group of participants on Monday, we will hopefully have our first blog post with that group within the next two weeks!! It's always exhilarating getting a new group and seeing who our next greenhouse participants will be :) Happy (belated) Easter and best wishes from EAS. In the interim between programs, this was the most recent office prank which was the result of someone leaving for vacation. If you want to do this for someone else, check it out here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-grass-grow-from-a-keyboard/ Another option is to pop out all of the keys, fill it with soil and scoop the dirt out of the key inserts, then pop the keys back on. No one will notice until the sprouts appear! Spring has tried to sprung - spring. Sprout! Welcome back to our greenhouse page! In our last post we mentioned that we would be picking up some bags of compost and sunshine mix. Surprise! We picked up 100, not 40, bags of mushroom compost (in addition to the 5 bags of sunshine mix). We recruited some extra hands for the heavy lifting process. They were tanks! One of our guys lifted the bags like he was spreading room temperature butter. Mmmmm.... butter. Once the bags were in the greenhouse we stacked everything for thawing and started for mixing when we need it. The bags of sunshine mix have been the major task for this week in filling pots to prep for seeding. Aside from the thawing process, we are also still working on figuring out a plan for the heating in the greenhouse. We got the heat going with the help from Forge North, and are hoping for a follow up to get the heat above the current 6 degree temperature. We're in the North, we're groanin' the grown. Wish us luck! We've started looking in to water tanks for the greenhouse to get water in during the remaining winter. We will have to update you further, later. In the meantime, we built two tumbling composters. What a morning! We also built a wagon this week that has a lifting/dumping option. Two brains are better than one. I would have been still holding the pieces without that second brain. For our 6-plex work, which we thought we might be done but we aren't, we had some flooding problems to troubleshoot. We troubleshot by filling the center of the tower with coconut coir to help absorb some of the excess water. We also started parsley and mint sprouting here to be transplanted in to the tower at maturity. Must be patient. Wish we had more to report on - we've been delayed because of heating difficulties. Although we will be finishing in the program on Friday (tomorrow) we will be spending some time in the greenhouse next week in an attempt to have more to share with you for next week's blog post adventure. These will be taken over by Jessica after today. As a fun experiment, before leaving, we started a pineapple scraps growing project. If you want to learn how to do this in your kitchen, check out the website: https://www.todayshomeowner.com/how-to-grow-pineapples-as-houseplants/ The million dollar question - and the answer is - a windy plant has no bugs land on it. I (Terri) would like to take this opportunity to thank the Challenge Program and the greenhouse for the wonderful experience, for all the personal growth that we all had, all the training (Curtis), and wish the next participants all the best. Goodbye little lady bugs! We pass the torch to the new planters. Long time no see, friends! Apologies for the delay in posting but, my, have we been busy! Since we are getting to the end of this program we had our practicum last week where we were out of the classroom. One of us went to Kilrich and one of us went to Health Promotions Unit, and had a wonderful WEEK. We are back in the office this week and back to business as usual. Because our spring hasn't sprung, the first bit of our week was spent troubleshooting how to get the heat going in our big, 'ol greenhouse. For our heater to kick on, and make the space roasty toasty, we have to have the heater at 10 degrees which just did not happen. We've had the coldest recorded March in Yukon history this year meaning our seedling babies don't stand a chance. In the meantime, we have been shoveling to at least keep the walkway clear. We have a guy from Yukon Electric coming in tomorrow so that we can hopefully start planting on Monday next week. In troubleshooting, we tried different combinations of heaters, in different locations, at different times - to no avail. Boo hoo!! On the plus side, MORE TOYS!!! We had WAY too much fun opening the boxes of gardening items from Lee Valley Tools. Some of the items we unpacked include portable kneeling stools for working on the sidewalk out front, a water bag to help transport water in to our winterized greenhouse and a handy tool that pumps out one seed at a time. How excited we are to use these! Another thing we got was the Grow Light Garden which uses a self watering mat and grow lights to start little plants! In order to get the seeds for the planter boxes started we will be picking up at least 40 bags of compost and 5 bags of sunshine mix early next week. Remember, always lift with your legs. Although we could have picked them up this week, they were frozen (-35 will do that) so will be defrosted first. Thank you Mother Nature. Sprouter, sprout stuff! Triton radishes, sandwich booster and Kamut, oh my! We have started new sprouts, with a second attempt at ch-ch-ch-chia seeds. Wish us luck! The last batch was a little... little. We planted some parsley for the 6-plex as these seeds need to be sprouted before being transplanted in to the tower for the best growth. Did we mention we also gave the 6-plex a trellis for their snow peas and nasturtiums!? Cause we did. Speaking of garden towers - Holy Hannah, there's mold! EVERYWHERE!! Just kidding, only in one spot. There was some bread that didn't escape the hole of darkness. It has now been removed and all is well. And in between all of that, we built some resumes. Lastly, thank you reading. We love sharing our experiences and we appreciate your views! The first several photos are of our lovely participants with our new toys from Lee Valley Tools. The 3rd and 4th pictures are of our Grow Light Garden! We talked about building this on your own with a water mat, some suspended grow lights and maybe a nice flat tupperware container (photos to come when we try building our own). The photo with the plastic wrapped metal poles are our tomato growth pipes (or cucumbers, or peas, or anything else that needs to climb) for our own growing season this year. Lastly, updates of our tower and the trellis at the 6-plex. The trellis photos show another image of a tomato growing option with bamboo sticks. Anything can work for trellis work - some other staff use twine tied to the top of the greenhouse beams although these are not quite as strong.
Hello friends of the Challenge greenhouse! Oh the things that we did this week! Firstly, we completed more inventory work. Our shelving units have now been reorganized and labelled. Our current sprouts are looking adorable and green (check out the growth process below). Our mites experiments seem to be working and we have sorted out our Bokashi issues. The solution for our Bokashi bucket was fixing one of the washers but we ended up throwing everything out because it was frozen and left outside - Jess' fault. The gang also checked in at the 6-plex as the snow peas have already started sprouting and required a trellis to continue on upwards! We did some purchasing of heaters today to ensure that, when we do get up to the Changing Gear greenhouse in a couple of weeks, it will be warm and ready to start growing. We plant the planter boxes that are located around the city here and will be starting our seeding ASAP. We organized ALL of our seeds as we received another shipment of seeds from West Coast Seeds which were specific to our planter boxes. Terri organized everything wonderfully as you might noticed the yellow tabbed tupperware in the shelving photos below. As well as organizing seeds, the group went and checked out the extent of damages to some of our planter boxes - we now have a plan and will hopefully be getting some of them fixed this summer. In organizing the seeds, the team spent a lengthy amount of time setting timelines for growing the different seeds and planning to make sure that everything grows when it needs to. What an amazing amount of work! What an amazing team! Troubleshooting lights - we had one of our LED tower lights flicker out yesterday and called our representative from Earth Connections Corner. He helped us out right away and we figured out, with his direction, that we had a fault connector wire. We can't thank the ECC team enough for all of their help throughout this garden tower adventure we've embarked on together and look forward to continuing working with them. We will be fixing the issue by next week, I bet! Another task that this team has taken on is the daunting task of creating things that can be used in future programs! The team has created a binder of growing information for towers, greenhouses, companion planting and sprouting (and more!) - to be used in future. They also took time yesterday to create a job description for a greenhouse helper which involves focusing on the tasks they currently do, or are planning to do, also if we ever need to hire a volunteer at any time! Way to go guys! Much administration. Many success. Hello friends, A quick posting to update you on our progress last week - we started an inventory! And sprouts, and a watering plan, and a seeding plan, and a planting plan! All of the plans! The greenhouse has now been filled with soil and so we are investigating how to get water in to it. We will likely be reclaiming our old water tank which gets installed in to the back of the truck in order to run a hose to the greenhouse. The other options we discussed were carrying watering can back and forth between the College and greenhouse, or Challenge and greenhouse, which would be very time consuming and physically draining. If you have ideas on how we might be able to get water in to this location, please don't hesitate to comment below. Our sprouts are still making moves upwards and we're continuing to care for them as we go. Our composting systems received a lot of attention two weeks ago so were not worked on much this past week. On Tuesday our team went to have a tour of the greenhouse at Changing Gear which is where we will be starting all of our seedlings for the city planter boxes. Most of the work this past week went to planning start times for planting and how to make sure that we plant everything soon. Thank you to West Coast Seeds, again, for their speedy delivery which allowed us to make growing plans and we can hopefully get started this week. The seeds we ordered vary from plants, such as amaranth, to vegetables, such as cucumber, to edible flowers. Additionally, our greenhouse guys finished an inventory of all the seeds that we have on hand and have started an inventory of all of our greenhouse supplies. As we often have to replace items or purchase new bags of soil, etc, it is in our best interest to have a formal process for our many things! We all took Friday off last week as well to celebrate Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous! If anyone checking in is from Whitehorse, we hope you had a lovely Rendezvous week and ate all of the Cabane A Sucre! Good afternoon fruit flies! (in a good way) Speaking of thank goodness, our little red mites seem to be relocating.... somewhere far, far away. Or all over Terri. Either way, we're glad to see them go. We've had some struggles with our Bokashi buckets lately. We had a tap break, as well as ended up dumping two because we didn't start them right in the fall. After doing some research, we found that we aren't using enough dry ingredients, so need to balance the buckets out with more breads and eggshells. Also, the buckets were likely getting too much oxygen and so we will be opening them less to allow them to ferment properly. A couple of side steps we had this week were causing our new pregnant AOC to dry heave after smelling the buckets, as well as an unplanned dumpster dive when losing a tray during dumping out the buckets. What. A. Waste. (get it.... cause it was garbage!?). For more Bokashi bucket support, see here: http://www.leangreenhome.co.uk/bokashi/bokashi-troubleshooting/553 It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it! We finished the digging out the greenhouse and filled it with brand new, beautiful smelling soil. It is yet to be watered - looking for winter solutions currently. Let us know if you have any ideas. SPROUTS! We successfully started new ones, and harvested, spicy lentil crunch, radish sprouts and kamut. The radish sprouts are spicy and hot if you're looking for a little heat - like our woodshop supervisor! Yum. :) Speaking of planting, the 6-Plex has been labeled and successfully seeded (pictures below). Some of the things we planted include Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, which actually looks like a deer tongue, hard and soft garlics, some lovely edible flowers (nasturtiums) and sweet peas! We have started some seedlings outside of the tower to ensure they grow properly which include two types of basil, peppermint, chives and parsley. Only the strong will survive - and make it in to tower. With our office tower, on location, we have put up a quick list as we are hiring lots of new people during this time of year, to make sure our garden tower is cared for with as much love, by everyone at Challenge, as we give it everyday. This week we started the funnest vegetable garden you'll see. We used our Psychedelic Salad kit and Funky Vegetable kit which we ordered off of Amazon from Plant Theatre. If you want to buy your own Plant Theatre products, follow this link: https://www.plant-theatre.co.uk/ You can also track our blog to see how your experience goes growing these kits. This morning our team went up to Changing Gear which is the location for our seed starting for our city streets planter boxes. We mentioned these in an earlier post and will keep you posted on this production process. If you want to check out Changing Gear, it is not quite a greenhouse building but their link is here: https://changinggear.ca/ Our last project today, which Bastien is leading, is a total seed inventory of all of the lovely seeds we have purchased, received by donation and found along the way. Last but not least, and on top of all of this awesome greenhouse stuff, the Challenge program participants received WHMIS certifications and Terri did up our Rendezvous window in our soon to be opening shop! Our woodshop, Twisted WoodWorks, will be having their shop grand opening on February 20! Be there, or be a turnip! Grow strong, see you next week! Good morning blueberries! We hope you had a lovely couple of weeks. We know we have as we have been VERY busy. We had to take a break from posting last week as we were in volunteer week where we provide labour for local organizations such as Whitehorse Food Bank and Freedom Trails. A quick update on the current status of our tower - we had to chat with some coworkers because we were finding that our softneck garlic was being braided in the tower. Although it looks pretty, it is not good for our little garlics as they grow. If you are growing at home, do not braid them prematurely please. Our Alien onion arms are growing successfully! Who-da-thunk-it!? Although not expecting this outcome, we are pleased to support our onions. A quick update on our little red mites who have taken over our vermicomposting bin. We tried the bread soaked in milk which worked initially, although didn't get rid of all of the mites. Now they are crawling up our participants legs - kidding! Right now we are trying watermelon and honeydew as a blog posting suggested, results TBD. Another effort was to remove some sprouts that were growing in the dirt in the chance that the mites might be attracted to those, as well. Ta-da! Our last resort, when it is warmer than -30C, will be to pick up some horticultural oil spray which was also suggested for getting rid of unwanted bugs. Speaking of bugs, we are still having some wandering fruit flies so will be trying to keep our eyes open, and our minds exploring, for additional trapping options. BOKASHI! Been doing very well so far. Our garden guru, Catheryne, found some strainers which are supposed to be placed at the bottom of the Bokashi buckets (pictured below) and may be the cause of some different colours found (red vs yellow). However, they are all fermenting... deliciously... Now the moment you have been waiting for! The winterized greenhouse has been emptied of the contaminated soil - 120-130 buckets later - and has now been filled with 9 bails of new sunshine mix #4 from Cliffside Greenhouse (pictured below). We have requested an additional 6 bags as the 9 we have already used do not quite fill the entire greenhouse. We will hopefully explore this more next week. Today we had a fun, surprise guest speaker. A local gardener in town had some awesome results following developing a solar collecting irrigation system for his own growing needs and we brought him in today to explain to us what he did! The end result of his growing project led to a 5 inch tomato from an 8 foot tall plant which was planted outside, in the ground, 1 month after ideal growing season. We can benefit from his information as the Yukon is undergoing MANY sustainability projects at this time - such as our garden tower! Great experience to connect with local innovators and share information. Thank you! Keep sprouting! We'll catch you next week! Good morning sprouts! Our week this week has been very sprout oriented so join us! Firstly, this week we received our seed donation from West Coast Seeds!! We received packages of seeds such as some edible flowers, such as lollipop mix and viola, some herbs and spices, such as basil and stevia, and some more lettuces, such as arugula. Thanks West Coast Seeds! If you want to order your own seeds, the link below will take you there. www.westcoastseeds.com/ On Tuesday we took pallets up to the winterized greenhouse for our buckets as we have loaded over 90 buckets of dirt so whomever is moving those may need help. We are waiting on about 30 more buckets to finish this project and are simply needing Canadian Tire to get in their next shipment before moving forward. On hold for now. MITE UPDATE: we have used some more bread submerged in milk to prevent reproduction of red mites which seems to be working, although not done yet. We also noticed red mites in our garden tower so are using the same process to get rid of these little vermin. Make sure to take a couple steps back from your gardening projects to make sure there aren't any bug issues like we're experiencing. Regarding bugs, we have also seen some fruit flies wandering around, trying to steal our bounty, and have put in a mason jar with soapy water and extra virgin olive oil, covered with a tight plastic seal, to entice and trap these little bugs. Regarding the second garden tower, after all the watering we did on Monday, when we checked on the tower on Tuesday the drainage tray was completely full of water. We took that water and used it to do our watering again so dumped the water on the top rung to prevent overflow and save water wastage. We will need to water the tower again before planting seeds. We took a power bar over to the 6-plex so they can plug in all their lights but the tower still needs an extension chord, in order to plug everything in, and some extra soil for the top rung of the tower as it's not quite full. The 6-plex has also given us their final selection for seeds so we will be finalizing our growing plan for the second tower this afternoon. Our sprouting has been in full effect this week as we started some mung beans and some kamut sprouts (also known as wheat-something-or-other). We also started a sprout experiment, called red perilla, which is supposed to take 1-2 years to sprout. Hopefully exciting for our future participants. We've also had the opportunity to taste our beautiful sprouts growing from last week's planting. These tasty ones are sunflower seeds and sugar peas. Yum! Our grow lights in the classroom have now been put to the test and are currently encouraging our little sunflower seeds and sugar peas. Note: some of our activities were delayed because we were kicking butt at FoodSafe. Our greenhouse team is now certified to serve you food (for the next 5 years)! Wah pow! We contract our trainers through a local organization called the Yukon Tourism and Education Council (YTEC) so if you're needing certification, perhaps because you want to cook and serve the awesome things you're growing in your own home, check them out: yukontec.com/ Until next week little sprouts! |
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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