Good morning flowers! Welcome to a new week! We have guest editors this week - our greenhouse guys and gals are doing this week's post! Over the weekend, our greenhouse group babysat their sprouts. Sprouts for this weekend were sunflower seed sprouts and sweet peas. As a continuation of the seed growth from the weekend, the team started broccoli sprouts in the classroom as the ones from last week were too moist which led to mold. The new process creates more drainage, involves plastic wrap with holes for more air, and less light during the initial growing process. Here's hoping this resolves our mold issue - to be continued. We will see as the week progresses. If you want to start your own broccoli sprouts, we liked this site: www.wikihow.com/Grow-Broccoli-Sprouts An update on our 1st tower, we have added new radish and spinach because they weren't growing too well. We also removed the sprouts/roots from an old onion that was trying to create new onions in Catheryne's pantry and planted them in to the tower. This one is a total experiment and, although looking like alien hooves, we're winning. 6-plex, here we come! We officially assembled the grow lights - there are now 3 working lights to be turned on once the seeds are in. Despite the three story climb, greenhouse participants hiked 12 rounds of full watering cans to start the watering process of the 6-plex tower. We won't plant seeds or give worms a new home in the 6-plex until the tower is fully watered, which we will do tomorrow (Tuesday). We asked the residents and employees what kind of plants they would like to see in their fancy new tower and they requested mostly salad building plants. When we came back to Challenge, we started considering what salad greens would be best in the 6-plex tower. Some ideas we had were spinach, sweet potato, leeks, romaine (and several other) lettuces, dill, onion, tomato, garlic (for the vampires), radish and broccoli. Yum yum! Regarding our composting processes, the Bokashi is going very well as the right kind of mold is growing which has taken down the kind of sickly, pickly sweet smell of rotting food. Our vermicomposting seems to be having some issues which led to panic from certain greenhouse members. The greenhouse participants spent some time this morning looking up how to manage red mites in the bin. We've discovered a method of getting rid of the mites using bread soaked in milk in the top bin. It should attract the mites to the bread which allows us to simply remove the bread AND the mites. The reason we want to get rid of the mites is that they make our wormy worms unhappy and leads to lower worm appetites. We shall see. If you're having issues with your own vermicomposting bin, check out Google as there are lots of options or go directly this site: www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/vermicomposting/pests-in-worm-bins.htm
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Good afternoon! We have uploaded our most recent gallery of progress! :) This week we have been working hard at emptying out our winterized greenhouse. In December we did some soil sampling in the greenhouse before growing consumable plants in the dirt and found that the levels were slightly high. As a result, the greenhouse folk have been working hard this week to empty the current dirt from within the winterized greenhouse and transferring it out. It has been a dusty process! We also purchased ALL of the buckets from Canadian Tire. The wood shop and greenhouse teamed up again this week to install an extra set of grow lights for our classroom projects! Our fearless leader, Catheryne, came up with the brain child of setting up a smaller growing system for things like our sprouts. The photos below show the pulley system, which allows lowering and raising the lights as needed, and will soon have the irrigation mat that has been ordered to help water the plants. Although the link provided shows a one-unit system, our process allows for more flexibility within our classroom environment. www.leevalley.com/en/garden/Page.aspx?p=68785&cat=2,44716 hosts the original system and we are excited to try the process here. Next week.... grow light assembly! Ps. aren't our greenhouse guys awesome!! They have allowed us to share their photos on the site! Meet our team! Hello friends of the Challenge Greenhouse! We have officially rung in the New Year, had some days off and started a new program! Apologies for the delays in posting as it has now been several weeks since we have shared what we're doing. Over the holidays we watered the greens in the tower to ensure they continued growing but mostly gave them space to do so. Unfortunately, our spinach on the top rung didn't grow, likely due to not getting enough light, but we have had lots of growth for everything else. Some websites suggest growing plants in little pots or containers in order to transplant only the healthiest plants in to the tower, which we didn't do, which might also impact some seeds doing really well and some taking a bit more nurturing to sprout. The current growing state is posted through photos below. Check out our garlic trees! Now I will explain our delays - on January 3 we started a brand new Employ Ability Skills program. Our first week of a new program always involves a 'getting to know you' week where the participants do not work in the worksites. We don't usually post what job coaches do as it is mostly maintenance and perhaps less exciting. Now that we are in our first week with participants in the greenhouse sector again we have started teaching them about the tower, vermicomposting and Bokashi composting, gardening (in general) and all the information related to working with plants. This week started with Catheryne and the team growing sprouts and learning more about the daily tasks here. The second half of the gallery photos show the sprouting being done with seeds such as alfalfa, sandwich booster and mixed beans as an initiation in to the program. Hope your January involves the growth of new things as well and good wishes. Sending cheer from the Challenge greenhouse! We have lights! I finished assembling the grow lights, after going to Home Hardware to purchase one, teeny tiny little screw which was missing from the shipment. Although the photo from the last post shows two sets of stands, only three of them (pictured below) are staying at our office and the other three are going to our residence where we assembled the second tower. The lack of updates for the second tower are due to the fact that we have delayed planting until the new year so we can have time to orient our new garden participants, as well as residence staff, to the tower and how to manage it. Setting up the lights will also occur in the new year as the lights need seeds to serve their purpose. Now that the lights are plugged in, to the power bar I had to purchase for the three separate plugs for each light, we have a Christmas rave happening in our staff room. Happiest of holidays and more to come in the New Year! Much love, from the Challenge Employ Ability Skills Program! Hello friends! This week has been quite busy with wrapping up the work from last week and finalizing this program. The greenhouse work has slowed to a near stop due to the program ending, and us therefore losing our program participants who did the majority of the work. However, we have received our grow lights and assembled them. Check them out! I was waiting on a part and have yet to finish assembling the final piece. I have also posted some photos of our growing progress. Grow little lettuce sprouts, grow! Cheers everyone! Good morning, It's a frosty -32 degree morning so what better time to update our followers! As I mentioned the other day, we received our second Garden Tower 2 spaceship a few weeks ago. Yesterday we assembled it at its new home! One of our residences has taken responsibility for the growing machine. Our part involved assembling the tower and providing the initial dirt. We will hold on planting until the New Year to ensure that our worms and seeds are properly cared for as the team gets used to the new project. We're also waiting until it warms up, just a touch! Electronic heat makes for a dry home. Pictured below - the assembly of our second tower, complete with instructions for assembling the bottom of the tower (these come with the purchase). Not pictured below are the additional tools we needed to properly assemble the tower.
Good work Greenhouse gals! SEEDS ARE IN! As of today, our seeds are in our tower. Check out our organization plans in the slideshow below. The first photo shows our visual planning for the tower as to where to plant things which involved a lot of research on companion planting. The second photo shows our label maker work in making sure everyone knows what is planted, where, and how to care for them. The third photo, although already planted, is the sprouting progress for our garlic! They're reaching up! The last two photos are Moravian stars which was a Christmas project completed by the girls on top of all their hard gardening work! They're so lovely! If you want some more tips on how to plant in your garden tower, check out www.gardentowerproject.com/ for resources and personal reviews and comments. The layouts that we worked off of are linked here: vertical-layout-emptytower.pdf AND vertical-layout-salad-tower__1_.pdf The second tower layout is for if you wanted to do a specific plan, such as a salad tower, whereas our planting was specific to the types of seeds we felt like growing first. The choice is yours! Have a great weekend! Hello everyone! It's a frigid -28 here in the capital of the Yukon so production has slowed significantly. It doesn't help that the sun hasn't made any efforts to wake up yet either... makes getting to work on a day like today a struggle in itself. But we're here! Yesterday and today we started looking in to planting seeds in our tower. I have included a link to the page (below) where we found some tips for our specific tower type (Garden Tower 2). I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions about how best to plant these guys! We are doing research on our own but feedback is always welcome. The link here is likely the protocol that we'll follow. www.gardentowerproject.com/news/towerpower-blog/entry/salad-tower-planting-plan-design Right now we're looking at some toy choy, radishes, and lots of leafy things. ALSO! LOOK HOW AWESOME YOU ALL ARE! And unique! We're only in week two or three of the blog and we're already getting site views! How exciting! Hello friends. Look at all of the seeds we've received!! The girls have halted production briefly as our other work sites are needing some help getting things finished for the holiday markets but we have our seeds ready in the background for this week. The greenhouse ladies have also been hard at it doing some out-of-garden garden work, such as winterizing our tower space. In our slideshow below I have pictured our window plastic, for reducing the cold drafts from our windows, and our new heater which keeps our tower space at a balmy 20 degrees celsius. Nice warmth for our little growers. Hope you are all having a fantastic start to your December and we look forward to sharing more of our progress with you! Our little garlic sprouts are excited to see you! And to keep you up to speed, this (the pine cones) is what the ladies have been doing the last couple of days in preparation for our annual Christmas luncheon! 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! |
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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