Baked Beans Squash

Tried, tested and tasted by myself is a delicious Baked Bean Squash, complete with an Acorn Squash from our own Garden! Here's how to do it:

Ingredients:
1 Acorn Squash
1 cup dried Navy Beans
1 tablespoon Sunflower Oil
1 tablespoon Molasses
1 teaspoon Paprika
1 teaspoon Cumin
1 teaspoon Soy Sauce
1 pinch Sea Salt

Either soak beans overnight and boil for 15 minutes, or boil dried beans for 30 minutes. Cut squash in half and clean out seeds. Preheat oven to 350°F. Bake empty squash for 30 minutes. Drain, then mix beans and spices together. Pour mixture into empty squashes and continue to bake for 30 minutes, or until soft and browning. Cover beans with tin foil if they begin to dry or appear as they were when dried.

Serve and enjoy!
Feeds 2 - 4

Frozen Rhubarb Drink

For next year, this drink is amazing to make out of our rhubarb patch!  I know my ma's recipe says to use ginger ale but white wine or vodka work nicely as well.  

 

2 ½ cups chopped rhubarb- fresh or frozen

1 cup water

 

Boil until mushy.  Strain with cheesecloth when it cools.

 

Add-

1 can frozen pink lemonade

1 cup sugar

1 ¼ cups pineapple juice

 

Freeze in something plastic.

Mix with ginger ale or white wine and sparkling water.

Corn Info

Why aren’t my corncobs thoroughly filled out?

Spotty filling of corncobs is due to poor pollination. This usually happens when corn is planted in a solitary row rather than in blocks.  Corn pollen must land on each thread of silk for complete pollination. Each strand of silk is attached to a single kernel. Corn breeders constantly strive to develop varieties with good tipfill, an industry buzzword for large, rounded, full cobs. Some of the older varieties don’t have great tipfill, while many of the new hybrids have excellent tipfill. 

When is corn ready to harvest? Can it tolerate any frost?


Corn is ready to harvest when the silks are brown and have dried up and you can feel the cobs through the husks. The tip of the cob should be blunt and feel full. The appearance and feel of the finished cobs differ with the variety. It takes a bit of experience to know exactly when the cobs are at their prime, but with time you’ll learn.

Corn will be badly damaged by even a light frost. If frost strikes once the cobs have matured, you have about one week to harvest them before the flavour starts to deteriorate significantly. If frost strikes before the cobs have matured, the corn will not ripen. 

The Dirty Hoe Radio Show & Our August Open House

Alex from the Dirty Hoe Radio Show was sweet enough to come out to our garden and interview the coordinator about what's new in 2009 for the ECOS' Campus Community Garden. Download the interview here.

The Dirty Hoe Radio Show is a weekly show on organic gardening in Edmonton that airs Friday at 12:05pm and Monday at 2pm on CJSR Edmonton FM88.

Great news: We're open again!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 from 10am - 4pm.

Visit the ECOS Campus Community Garden for our second and final openhouse of the summer season! Tour the organic garden space, see how ourplants have grown, learn and participate in community composting, meet our volunteers and learn about environmentally-sustainable gardening methods.

The market will be open - including every other Saturday - to purchase fresh produce, herbs, soil, and plants.
A BBQ will also be available with veggie dogs & burgers to buy.

Harvest Time and Recipe Sharing

Harvest time is upon us here at the ECOS' Campus Community Garden!

Since July, we've had a steady harvest of mixed lettuces, spinach and leafy-greens. Right now, they have either reached their expiry in the 50-day life cycle and have been reseeded, or they have yet to go to seed and are still producing delicious yields. Our 250 m² garden's been producing over 10 KG of these leafy greens!

Approaching August, we've sighted zucchinis, squashes, snow peas, snap peas, raspberries, strawberries and different colours of beans maturing in our garden. Soon, we'll be able to open a market out front of our garden with all of the delicious produce. So, in order to enjoy these foods, we'll provide some neat things to do with them.

Basic Raspberry Vinaigrette

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup raspberries
• 1/2 cup vinager (apple cider, rice, and/or balsamic)
  
• 2 tsp stevia, or sugar replacement
• 1 tbsp dijon mustard
• 1/4 cup vegetable or olive oil

Optionals:

• 1 tbsp flaxmeal
• 1 clove pureed garlic
• 1/4 cup strawberries
  

Preparation:
Add all ingredients, except oil to a blender or food processor and puree until smooth. Slowly add oil until well combined. Pour over mixed leafy greens, nuts, and/or seeds and enjoy.

Please share your recipe ideas including some of the vegetables and herbs we'll be growing our garden. Comment your recipe in and it'll be visible on this blog!

Open House Follow-Up

Thank you to everyone who came out to our Open House on Saturday July 18th!

We had a couple dozen community members visiting along with a couple dozen volunteers present. We had a BBQ to appreciate our volunteers who have worked hard to get the garden to where it is now. Our neighbours got an extensive tour of our garden and what its doing.

Here are some photos from the day:

A southern facing view of the garden from its centre point.
Tomatoes visible in the foreground, hot-house on the left side of the frame.

Two of our volunteers reseeding lettuce in between existing rows.

A volunteer is harvesting snow peas.
Snap peas and raspberry bush visible in the foreground.

Some of our younger volunteers are taking a tour of the garden between the beet and carrot rows.

Thank you all again for your interest in the UofA Campus Community Garden. Visit again shortly for tips and tricks in the garden as we go along with harvesting, composting, reseeding, and doing some final transplants - the organic way!

Garden Open House - Sat July 18th

We're opening our fence gates to give our neighbours and friends in the community a better look at our garden on the UofA campus!

This Saturday, July 18th, from 10am - 4pm, we'll be having an open house at the garden. There will be a market of fresh produce, herbs, potted plants and compost available for purchase (be early!), as well as an opportunity to observe our plant growth, and learn our gardening techniques.

RSVP on Facebook
RSVP via E-mail

See you all there!

Volunteer Opportunities

For Saturday, we will need volunteers present for the following activities:

• Setup - 9:30am - 10am
• Transplanting demo - 10:30am - 11am
• Composting demo - 11am - 12pm
• BBQ - 12pm - 2pm
• Setdown - 4pm - 4:30pm
• Being present - 10am - 4pm
  

If you are available for any of these activities, sign up on the right column under Open House Volunteer Shifts!

My schedule in the garden this week (weather depending) is:

• Mon July 13 - 12pm - 4pm
• Tues July 14 - 12pm - 4pm
• Weds July 15 - 6pm - 8pm
• Thurs July 16 - 6pm - 8pm
• Fri July 17 - 12pm - 4pm
  

Stop on by during these times if you'd like to work in the garden, and would like a helping hand.

See you all soon!

Those Thieving Magpies!

Some guests to our garden are exceptionally friendly and resourceful; others aren't so much. As mentioned before, we are growing raspberries and strawberries, which have been blooming and riping since the end of June. However, someone's been coming into our garden and eating them.

Let me introduce to you, the common Magpie. The Magpie is not a welcomed guest to gardens, as they like to steal fruits, pull out plants, and attack or scare away other, more friendly birds. To get them out of your garden and to stay out, as well as with most pests, there are two organic methods one can use and should become familiar with: exclusion and frightening.

Frightening animals is a safe and highly recommended method of pest control in our garden. In the Magpie case, we installed a few additions to our garden:


In this picture, you can see a shiny pin-wheel at the bottom, and a hanging tin-foil tray at the top. These things refract light, move with the wind, and occasionally cause small noises. Inconsistent and unexplained shining of light, noises, and movements tend to scare most birds. Putting these things next to and on our berry producing plants has successfully reduced the amount of Magpies hanging out around them.


This is a scarecrow, and an actually morbid one at that. Scarecrows give the illusion that there is a gardener present, and even further, you can see that this gardener is reflecting light. Other recommendations for scarecrow construction include faces with eyes on both sides of the head, lose fitting clothing that moves in the wind, and shiny objects in their "hands," each of which would mimic an actual gardener, without one being present.

Without causing harm to the actual animal, you can exclude it from entering your garden. In the case of a magpie eating our garden's berries, you can cover plants in a breathing blanket, or chicken wire. This method, however, becomes very complicated and frustrating, if you're working with a lot of gardeners. It can be efficient for some pests, if all that is necessary to exclude the animal is a fence around the garden.

Our Naturalization Project actually had a hare visit while I was writing this. They came right in, hopped over to our Saskatoons, and just started eating the leaves off of it. It began to eat whole plants, and grasses in our native bed. In this case, we'll have to keep a gate closed in order to prevent hares from getting in, or wanting to get in, to eat our plants.

Happy gardening, and good luck with your pests!

Sweet Successes to Savour

When June arrived, we had a lot of challenges with the excessively hot and sunny days, which damaged or killed off some of our plants. However, in the Campus Community Garden, there have been lots of successes!

We appreciate all the volunteers who had laboured heavily in the garden during these dry periods, and watered constantly. One of the fruits of their labour is the collection of some of our harvest. In June, we've harvested at least 24lbs of mixed greens, including Spinach, Red Mustard, Arugala, and Red and Green Leaf Lettuces. However, when the volunteers have had their fair share of salad mixes, we donate the rest of our harvests to the Campus Food Bank. At least 10 lbs of the harvest was donated throughout June.

Half-way through June, we noticed our Spinach bolting. This is when the plant produces less leaves for consumption and more seeds for spreading. It results from the longer and hotter days in the summer, which means that the early spring is the best time to plant and early summer for harvest, or late summer for early autumn.

We're going to give planting spinach another shot in the shadier garden areas, and in between existing rows to see how they will turn up. We're also figuring out ways to reduce pests in our garden and what to plant in mid-summer. So check out our blog shortly for these updates!

Growing Up, Out and Growing Pains

In June the Campus Community Garden has seen a lot of growth, both in our space management and vegetable plants. Here, we'll explain how the Campus Community Garden grows up and out, while pointing out some of our growing pains in this month.

We take advantage of vertical space at the campus garden to increase our vegetables' yield and to diversify the species of plant-life in our garden. We do this by encouraging the vertical growth of trellising plants, and building troughs - a new edition to our greenhouse. Our trellising plants include:

• Snow Peas
• Tricolour Pole Beans
• Grapes (variety to be determined)
  

As well, we will be planting pumpkins for July, which are able to be trellised and will be ready for October-November. When they start to flower, a net will have to be designed to hold the pumpkin, so that its weight does not cause it to prematurely fall off the trellis.

Physically, the garden has expanded outwards in a plot at the Eco House and to the north our fence-line. Of course, with building new plots, we always respect the space necessary for volunteers to travel through, with equipment, or for comfort. Most of our expansion this year has been acquiring new space. In these new plots we've planted:

• Potatoes
• Mokum Hybrid F1 Carrot
• Strawberry Spinach
• Crisp Mint Lettuce
• Space F1 Spinach
• Monnopa Spinach
• Mizcina
• Red Russian Kale

We'll be updating on the condition of these plants as frequently as we will with the other plants in our gardens.

Finally, we say good night to the plants that did not make it through the Edmonton climate between planting in April and through the month of May. Cold weather (accompanied with snow) mid-May, followed by excessive sun and heat, mixed with cool evenings caused a bit of crop and seed damage. Here's a list of transplants and seeds that did not make it through the early part of the season, and which we cannot update anyone on anymore:

• Most of the Lemon, Diva and Sweet Success Cucumbers
• Milkmaid Nasturtiums
• Calendula nana Candyman Yellow
  
• Orange Thyme
• Some of the Windsor and Blue Wind Broccoli

However, with every loss, there is a gain. In some of their places we are growing the Tricolour Pole Beans, as well as Radishes and Mammoth Sunflowers. We will be updating as to the conditions of these plants and how they're growing.


Right now, we are having a huge success with our Strawberries. We do not know the variety yet, but when we do we will let our blog readers know about the success we have with these berries in our climate! Here's a shot of the little berries. They began to flower at the end of May and have produced a few red ones in June.

More updates on the progress through June will be coming up!

Campus Garden Grows Again - 2009 Edition

It's been an incredible time for the ECOS garden this year, which saw its first planting in mid-April. The volunteers and gardeners have been busy building new projects for the space, extending it, and seeing a lot of new vegetables sprout up!

Like always, the garden is organically grown, which means we use non-GMO seeds and organic weed and pest reduction methods. The garden is communally gardened, instead of a plot-based system, and open to student and community involvement. If you reside in the Edmonton-area, stop by and visit the garden near the University of Alberta campus on 89th Ave between 110th and 111th Street.

I'm Ashton, the Coordinator for this year's garden, and I hope this year's blog can help connect the volunteers, gardeners, community and interested web-goers to our garden online. Here you'll be able to have updates as to the status of our garden, observations of vegetable behaviour, tips and tricks in the garden, and then some recipes when the vegetables are ready for harvest.

Here's what's new for April 2009:

• Extended the garden north even further
• Lots of new beds in the garden with different shapes and sizes
• Acquired a plot of land next to the Eco House residence for gardening

Here's what's planted from April 2009:

• Beans: Snap Bush, Purple Royal Burgundy
• Roots: Scallion, Allysum Bull's Blood Beets, F1 Hercules Carrot, Garlic
• Leafy greens:Red Mustard, Red Russian Kale, Red Velvet Lettuce, Euro Red and Green Lettuce, Smooth Leaf Spinach, Tyee Spinach, Romaine Lettuce, Arugala, Red Leaf Lettuce
• Cucumbers: Lemon, Sweet Success, Diva
• Squashes: Green Tint Patty Pan, Table Ace, Yellow Zucchini
• Tomatoes: Green Zobra, Red Zobra, Mexican Midget, Juliet, Red Brandywine, Oregon Spring, Yellow Cherry, Silvery Fit Tage, Black Seaman, Purple Prudeuce
• Flowers: Milkmaid nasturtium, Candy man yellow calenvula
• Herbs: Italian Large Leaf Basil, Mrs. Burns' Lemon Basil, Lime Basil, Nayoletano Basil, Creeping Thyme, Orange Thyme, Savory, Common mint, Korean mint, Cumin, Curled Parsley, Dill, Chervil
• Berries: Strawberry, Raspberry
• Other: Sunny Vee Hybrid Corn, Rhubarb, Jerusalem Artichokes, Windsor Broccoli, Blue Wind Broccoli, Snow Peas

So if you have any of these varieties of plants in your garden and want to compare to send input, then keep visiting this blog, and feel free to post comments. Hope to hear about other's success stories.

The next update will include what's new for May 2009, and what will be coming up for the rest of the summer. Stay pruned!