How's the Weather?

If you look at the bottom of the page, you will find a new feature...our weather station. You may also notice that it gives the weather for the New York area. You can use this station to find Baltimore weather by clicking on "edit" and entering your zip code. We want to know it you feel that this is a worthy addition to our site, so please take the time to play around with it, and then let us know with your comments if it should stay or go.

Another Garden Harvest with students

We had a great group of students from across the grades come by and harvest yesterday as their parents were in their own school orientation and conferences. They were very excited to see the fruits of their labor as many have not seen the garden since mid-June.

We picked tomatoes - all kinds, cucumber, beans, and peppers. It appears we have pumpkins forming, and everything is thriving. We've been a bit dry the last few days so I supplemented the timed watering with a good manual soak.

The pollinators have truly discovered the pollinator garden and we even had a monarch yesterday. The bumblebees are loving the sunflowers too! Go GSB!

Another inch of Rain

We had another inch of rain this week-end. The peppers are really starting to perk up and the eggplant has many blossoms. Of course some of the weeds are enjoying the rain too. The kids come back to school next week and we are looking forward to them seeing the garden. We are planning to start to work with them to start thinking about our cover crops as well as what we want to plant for the upcoming cool weather.

Harvest Day in the garden

It was a hot and muggy harvest this morning! Jabray, Jamary and their grandad helped. I took pictures of the harvest and emptied the rain gauges. I will probably do some weeding and removal of dead branches and leaves from plants tomorrow. A couple of the heirloom tomatoes that I thought have fusurium are bouncing back a bit, while another is all but done.

I will post a picture or two later today from today's harvest. I shared the harvest with Jabray and Jamary's family and neighbors across the street on Kentucky. Even Toronta took some tomatoes today! Have I said how excited I am about the corn?! And the sunflowers are big and beautiful too.

And me without a basket

We stopped by the garden this evening and it was full of ready to pick produce. Tomatoes, beans, cucumber, squash, strawberry, peppers... It caught me by surprise, this is the first big harvest. We got a bunch of rain last night from that thunderstorm, the rain gauge said about one-half inch. We will go back properly prepared to harvest tomorrow. I will take some pictures.

Also, I am very excited that the indian corn is forming ears, and it appears the popcorn is not far behind - I really hope they do well. I think the kids will be so excited.

Our Vegetable Garden

The GSB Organic Teaching Garden was designed by our parent-run Garden Club. Our 5th graders will become organic gardening experts by studying the success and failure of this garden and designing their own garden to give to the next 5th grade class.

We have 5 raised-beds for food production that are planted in companion-style neighborhoods and are on a 4 year crop rotation. Our perimeter beds were designed by our kindergarteners to attract and support pollinators. The perimeter beds also include native plants, food crops, and fun crops like indian corn.

In addition to supporting and enhancing classroom education, the garden will support our Mangia Mondays which are facilitated by our Wellness Coordinator. The seasonal crops we produce are explored every Monday and shared in our dining room during lunch time.