Friday, May 29, 2009

Hectic Times

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic for Augie Acres. A lot of our students have headed home for the summer, and our summer helpers have taken a few days or a week off before moving back to the QCA for the summer. We have our first market scheduled for noon on Friday, June 5th at the Augie Acres site. We are excited! This has been a goal of ours, and it is exciting to be so close to meeting it.

Augustana has added our market to the website's calendar, and we'll be advertising next week as well. Tell your friends! We hope to have salad greens and radishes ready to go.

Our group was also featured on the Augustana website. You can read the story here:

http://augustana.edu/x13026.xml

Hope to see you next week!

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Augie Acres has made the news! Last week, we had about 22 students and staff come out for a work day at the garden plots. We planted some strawberry plants, cucumbers, and carrots and started the big job of hoeing around aleady growing plants. This was our most productive day yet, and there was a reporter and photographer there from the Quad Cities Times there as well. We are included in two stories, which can be found here:

http://www.qctimes.com/news/local/article_e5c30c04-3e7d-11de-b5a3-001cc4c002e0.html

http://www.qctimes.com/article_03a7d8da-3e92-11de-b854-001cc4c002e0.html

It's great that the community is taking an interest in our project!

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Sustainability Summit

Recently, our project had the opportunity to reach out to the higher education community in the Quad Cities. Our project was selected to represent Augustana College at the first ever Quad-Cities Intercollegiate Sustainability Summit at the Putnam Museum in Davenport, IA. You can see more information at the summit here: http://www.augustana.edu/x12702.xml For a more detailed background and description of our project, you can open up our presentation.

It was really interesting to see what projects other schools have been working on lately. There are a lot of great things going on in the QCA!

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Roots

Welcome to the Augie Acres blog! So, it seems like things are finally getting rolling with our garden plots. We've put in a lot of work lately, and now we even have some baby plants growing! For those of you who might not know, this is our first growing season in our attempt to develop a student-run garden on campus. A lot of students have been working on this project in various ways for about six months now, so it's rewarding to be able to see some tangible results.


We are the caretakers of approximately one acre of land located on the northwest corner of campus. These lots have been vacant for years and nothing permanent could be build on them because of soil subsidence. We hope to grow vegetables and fruits for the campus community and curb the run-off and erosion on these pieces of land. Hopefully, nearly all of our produce will be returning to the campus community via the college's dining facilities and through a farmer's market-esque produce sale.


Currently, we have snow peas, snap peas, swiss chard, spinach, beets, red radishes, white radishes, herbs, red onions, white onions, red potatoes, and white potatoes planted. We also have planted a butterfly garden, a mixed flower garden, and begun digging a rain garden. We hope to plant some more varieties of produce in the coming months, but the weather has not exactly been helpful lately.


Here are some photos:



These are the plots before any work was done. This photo was taken the day we cleaned up the plots. We found tires, bottles, an old TV, a fence post, and an ornamental cement seahorse.




This is the day we tilled up the plots. Our friend and awesome-at-making-things-happen-guy, Jim, lent us a hand by bringing in his tiller. You can check out his operation's website at: http://www.wesleyacresproduce.com/




This picture is a snapshot of what we have growing now. This picture was taken on May 2nd, about two weeks after we tilled and began planting.


Hopefully we have some nice weather for a few days and can get some more produce planted. Also, we need to develop a bunny-repellent that is an effective way to keep bunnies away. Any ideas?