the terrace beds: Balyn's feat
Today was an awesome, epic day. It began raining, and all through the morning our freezing-cold small crew worked to weed. We took on the area around the two beds 14 and 15, to the left of the picnic bench. In the beginning it was just Matt, Gulliver, Sarah, and I, but close to noon Balyn and Ryan came.
Today was a very important meeting for us, and especially for Balyn. After we had finished the morning part of the day, Balyn invited us to sit with him and plan out what the two terrace beds would look like once we started working on them. Balyn, Ryan, Matt, Henry Symons, Gulliver, and I met beneath the canopy (the one that sits above the picnic area) and talked about the beds. To give a history, Balyn has been working on those two beds for three quarters - or more? - in order to make them accessible to the PICAns. It was his senior thesis, and he's written a document on it (he'll print it for us soon). The two terrace beds overlook the bike path as it goes from above the A-Quad to beneath the Farm - they point slightly southeast, towards the center of Monterey Bay. Balyn has ideas for planting the hillside with native plants. As for the two beds... they've seen two quarters' worth of covercropping, and they were recently tilled in. So it is time to plant them out with sun-loving species and make use of them.
Balyn suggests making one bed the dried goods bed - the one from which we save seed, dry the crop (beans, winter squash, etc) or can it - in other words, the one which saves the most for future PICAns. The other one would feed PICAns and Short Course participants. Mike had said some ideas for potential intercrops: corn-bean-squash (milpa), eggplant-potato, and tomato-basil-marigold. Balyn says we can divide the beds into smaller-sized chunks to work out the intercrops or crop schemes. He decided not to leave behind a crop rotation scheme, because he wants the ideas to come from the participants themselves.
Balyn led us to the beds, and there we heard the visual descriptions of his ideas. There are some beekept-bees nearby, and they will be perfect for pollination. Perhaps we could put perennial flowering herbs as bedends, the way we do in the Foundational Roots Garden. Sadly, this is the place where I found out the motivation for this inspiring meeting. Balyn is leaving shortly for the Mendocino area and will not be back for some time. He is leaving these beds to us. I will miss him; he says that he will try to come back on a Thursday or Saturday sometime. I hope so.
Gulliver made a commitment to coordinating the beds for Spring quarter. I am so excited! :-) Matt and I will help him, whenever possible, work on them. And of course, the PICA seminar and Saturday workcrew will have a big role in them. We thanked Balyn for his hard handiwork, and we left. Back to the B-Quad.
Matt and Gulliver continued weeding. I was exploring the soil tilth of bed 5a when Mike arrived. When I told him what I was doing, he clamored for a double-digging. The bed had been partially double-dug by PICA seminar on Thursday, but they had not been able to finish it. The soil, past the first spade's depth, was much too compacted still, and I had irrigated it since then to help soften those deeper layers. We decided to smoothe the soil back over the bed (it was in mounds), put a layer of compost on top, double-dig the trenches in conjunction with a hoer (breaking up the dirt clods) and a bucket of compost per trench, and start on one end of the bed and work our way to the other, without subdividing the bed. Once we had agreed on these things, we were ready. Without further ado, Rain, Sarah, Mike, Billy, Matt, Gulliver, and I set to work.
We took turns cutting the bed and bottoms of trenches with a pulaski, moving each trench sideways and breaking up the clumps with a hoe, gathering compost from the tarp near the gate, and forking the rock-hard bottom of the trenches. Tony came and helped us out at once point. The eagle flew by overhead. Turns out there was quite a heavy layer of clay there (still is) that we can barely penetrate still. There are other areas in the Garden more easily penetrable than that bed, I must say. But our little team, amidst the banters, managed to break the soil a few inches further down. We finished three hours later, stopping only for cookies and coffee.
Mike raked the top of the bed smooth, and elevated higher than the other four beds. We left that bed as an example and will most likely double-dig bed 4a tomorrow. The sun was sideways in the sky as we finished, a little before sunset. And at that point, Ngoc and Diane had gone to town making sushi. Ngoc is learning all the names of the plants within their families. I write them on our whiteboard, and she writes them down in her plant journal. Today she wrote Lamiaceae; last time Amaranthaceae. I am so excited for her!
Anyway, we went inside to help her and Diane make sushi and watched a movie about sushi rice. Meanwhile, Sarah and David played amazing music, then we ate some sushi, and then we went to see David perform his music from Latin America with his ensemble of Taki Ñan musicians at Family Student Housing, which was amazing...
Today was a very important meeting for us, and especially for Balyn. After we had finished the morning part of the day, Balyn invited us to sit with him and plan out what the two terrace beds would look like once we started working on them. Balyn, Ryan, Matt, Henry Symons, Gulliver, and I met beneath the canopy (the one that sits above the picnic area) and talked about the beds. To give a history, Balyn has been working on those two beds for three quarters - or more? - in order to make them accessible to the PICAns. It was his senior thesis, and he's written a document on it (he'll print it for us soon). The two terrace beds overlook the bike path as it goes from above the A-Quad to beneath the Farm - they point slightly southeast, towards the center of Monterey Bay. Balyn has ideas for planting the hillside with native plants. As for the two beds... they've seen two quarters' worth of covercropping, and they were recently tilled in. So it is time to plant them out with sun-loving species and make use of them.
Balyn suggests making one bed the dried goods bed - the one from which we save seed, dry the crop (beans, winter squash, etc) or can it - in other words, the one which saves the most for future PICAns. The other one would feed PICAns and Short Course participants. Mike had said some ideas for potential intercrops: corn-bean-squash (milpa), eggplant-potato, and tomato-basil-marigold. Balyn says we can divide the beds into smaller-sized chunks to work out the intercrops or crop schemes. He decided not to leave behind a crop rotation scheme, because he wants the ideas to come from the participants themselves.
Balyn led us to the beds, and there we heard the visual descriptions of his ideas. There are some beekept-bees nearby, and they will be perfect for pollination. Perhaps we could put perennial flowering herbs as bedends, the way we do in the Foundational Roots Garden. Sadly, this is the place where I found out the motivation for this inspiring meeting. Balyn is leaving shortly for the Mendocino area and will not be back for some time. He is leaving these beds to us. I will miss him; he says that he will try to come back on a Thursday or Saturday sometime. I hope so.
Gulliver made a commitment to coordinating the beds for Spring quarter. I am so excited! :-) Matt and I will help him, whenever possible, work on them. And of course, the PICA seminar and Saturday workcrew will have a big role in them. We thanked Balyn for his hard handiwork, and we left. Back to the B-Quad.
Matt and Gulliver continued weeding. I was exploring the soil tilth of bed 5a when Mike arrived. When I told him what I was doing, he clamored for a double-digging. The bed had been partially double-dug by PICA seminar on Thursday, but they had not been able to finish it. The soil, past the first spade's depth, was much too compacted still, and I had irrigated it since then to help soften those deeper layers. We decided to smoothe the soil back over the bed (it was in mounds), put a layer of compost on top, double-dig the trenches in conjunction with a hoer (breaking up the dirt clods) and a bucket of compost per trench, and start on one end of the bed and work our way to the other, without subdividing the bed. Once we had agreed on these things, we were ready. Without further ado, Rain, Sarah, Mike, Billy, Matt, Gulliver, and I set to work.
We took turns cutting the bed and bottoms of trenches with a pulaski, moving each trench sideways and breaking up the clumps with a hoe, gathering compost from the tarp near the gate, and forking the rock-hard bottom of the trenches. Tony came and helped us out at once point. The eagle flew by overhead. Turns out there was quite a heavy layer of clay there (still is) that we can barely penetrate still. There are other areas in the Garden more easily penetrable than that bed, I must say. But our little team, amidst the banters, managed to break the soil a few inches further down. We finished three hours later, stopping only for cookies and coffee.
Mike raked the top of the bed smooth, and elevated higher than the other four beds. We left that bed as an example and will most likely double-dig bed 4a tomorrow. The sun was sideways in the sky as we finished, a little before sunset. And at that point, Ngoc and Diane had gone to town making sushi. Ngoc is learning all the names of the plants within their families. I write them on our whiteboard, and she writes them down in her plant journal. Today she wrote Lamiaceae; last time Amaranthaceae. I am so excited for her!
Anyway, we went inside to help her and Diane make sushi and watched a movie about sushi rice. Meanwhile, Sarah and David played amazing music, then we ate some sushi, and then we went to see David perform his music from Latin America with his ensemble of Taki Ñan musicians at Family Student Housing, which was amazing...
posted by Yvea at 6:00 PM
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