Blog Post #4

Hey there! Welcome to our fourth blog post and our third outing into the teaching gardens to check on our crops!

It was finally time to transfer our seedlings and although we started off with a stormy afternoon, we quickly got to work measuring our plot and planting our seeds. Everyone on the team had a great time creating proper spacing, digging holes, and putting our little plants in the ground. It was fascinating to see the differences among our seedlings—while the tomatoes and bell peppers were still quite small, the pumpkins and corn boasted impressive root systems. 

Spacing was interesting to figure out as we weren't really sure how close we could push our plants together without interfering with their growth. With the Three Sisters technique that we're using, we ended up placing the corn, beans, and pumpkins pretty close together. We also created walking space in between our rows to minimize damage when planting. This is the stage where we finalized all the crops that we were going to be planting, take a look at our final lineup:

• Corn - so much corn...
• Pumpkins 
• Pole beans 
• Tomatoes
• Kale 
• Spinach 

And that wraps up day three! Come back for future posts to see how the crops do now that they're finally in the ground. 

Photo captions (left to right, down to up): 

1. These are some of our transplants in the greenhouse. Some lettuce and watermelon seedlings can be seen in the image.

2. Team members Phillip, Kyle, Kensley, Daniel, and Naomi work together to plant some of our transplants from the greenhouse. Team member Daniel is handing out the different varieties of tomato that are going to be used in our farm plot. 

3. These are our corn seedlings ready to transplant. We are growing two varieties of corn, one sweet corn and one field corn. The field corn we are growing is an Indian corn variety which will provide beautiful ears that are often used for decoration.

4. Our completed Three Sisters plot. Corn, squash, and beans are grown in close proximity in order to provide each other with specific benefits. The corn grows straight and tall which will provide support for our pole beans to climb upwards as they develop their vines. The squash/pumpkin is good for weed suppressant and stability as the plants have wide leaves and heavy fruit to shade out the ground. The beans provide much needed nitrogen to the soil with its symbiotic relationship with rhizobia.

5. Naomi cutout: Here we can see team member Naomi holding up some corn transplants to be used in our Three Sisters plot.