Over at the Botanical Gardens "secret" garden site, we are harvesting the quinoa we started from seed in May. No one on the Cultivating Community team has experience with harvesting quinoa so we delved the internet for answers. When the quinoa plant leaves are dried and the plant itself looks dead the quinoa should be ready. The seeds are mature when you can no longer make an indent on the kernels with your fingernail.
The quinoa stalk in the above photo is ready to harvest. In fact, we were late on collecting the seed because many of them started to germinate while on the plant!
We collected the seed by rubbing up the stalk and angling the seed head into a bowl we used to store the quinoa. The collection process left us with a bowl full of quinoa seed and the dried "chaff". We used a technique called wind winnowing to remove some of the "chaff" from the quinoa. Wind winnowing is a simple method of grain processing that has been used for thousands of years.
Many cultures developed simple contraptions to accomplish winnowing. We are substantially lower tech at this garden plot, so we simply would wait for a light breeze and take handfuls of the mixture and drop it back into the bowl. The wind would blow away the unwanted plant parts because they were so light while the seeds fell right back into the container. We also did this for amaranth seed. A photo of those plants can be seen below.
Both of these grains have their roots in the Andean region of South America. The Incans cultivated these plants to fuel their empire. After the Conquest several indigenous groups kept the strains alive despite Spanish government prohibitions. The Rodale Institute considers them "supergrains" because of their high protein, fiber, and iron content. Quinoa contains all twenty essential amino acids for human nutrition. North Americans grew Amaranth for years, mainly for its asethetic appeal, but now it is gaining popularity as a food crop. There are detailed Wikipedia articles on both plants if you want to know more about these wonder foods.
Quinoa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa
Amaranth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth
Hope everyone is ready for school to begin! Be sure to check out the Cultivating Community table at Festifall and at Northfest!
The polyculture bed’s radishes were picked, topped, and washed. By clearing out the radishes, sunlight can now reach tiny seedlings of the other plants. I will need to thin in the next few weeks and I have the agonizing decision to choose which vegetables will grow to full size and those that will not. I cannot wait until the seedlings grow larger and observe how much this method yields.
One organization that is doing great things in the Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor area is Growing Hope. Growing Hope’s mission and their current and past projects are displayed on their website: 
The strawberries take up most of the bed space, but one of the corners has a teepee with cucumber seedlings planted along its base. The other raised beds in the garden are showcasing different small scale gardening techniques.
The bed pictured above is our companion planting bed. Companion planting is placing different plants in close proxmity to one another because it is believed that they aid in nutrient uptake, pest reduction, weed reduction, attract pollinators, etc. We learned of the pairings we did through the book Roses Love Garlic by Louise Riotte. There is little to no scientific evidence in support of companion planting, however, many gardeners, and farmers believe it works.
This bed is using the methods outlined in Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening. A gird is placed on the bed cordonning it off into foot by foot squares which serves as a guideline for spacing. An example would be that one corn would fit in one square while sixteen beets can be in the same space. There are other aspects to the technique that we chose not to follow, such as the soil requirements. The author wants his readers to use a specially measured out soil mixture, but we simply used the soil that was preexisting in the bed.
The final bed is being used to test the idea of a polyculture bed, which I first read about on the blog Homegrown Evolution (
Image of frost burn (not taken at Ginsberg)
Garlic Mustard
Bean teepees are supportive structures that allow bean plants to vine upwards. The teepee we used is four wooden posts tied together at the top with string. The string was then tied around the teepee in a trellising pattern to give the plants more opportunites to vine. I have seen instructions on how to make a bean teepee so large that people can go inside it when the beans are at their peak of growth. Bean leaves are large and numerous so the teepee is very well shaded.
We mulched all of the plants with straw that we found on site. There are a myriad of reasons to mulch such as to prevent weeds, and to retain moisture in the soil for longer periods. Straw is an organic mulch so over time the straw will decompose which improves the quality of the soil. Also the mulch acts as a windbreak for the tiny new transplants keeping them warmer than if they were more exposed. The volunteers then watered the plants with buckets because we forgot to bring the hoses (we will bring them next time, promise!). 
We have an upcoming field trip to Agrarian Adventure, this is their website: 
It is a great program that has tons of youth and community involvement in the Ann Arbor area. Also the garden they manage at Tappan Middle School has a huge strawberry patch! I hope the strawberries will have fruited by the time we head out there on May 26th. 
The volunteers and interns roused the garden from its winter slumber by removing the Rye Grass cover crop and weeding out several maple saplings that had taken root in the garden beds and herb spiral. The purpose of the cover crop is to prevent soil erosion as the beds overwinter, to prevent the establishment of hardy weeds, and to provide nutrient rich plants that can be composted when the summer begins. Rye grass is a very good choice as a cover crop because it is regularly used for erosion control programs.
Through clearing of the straw and rye grass we discovered several plants from last year: dill, Russian kale, turnip, cilantro, and parsley. Many of the perennials planted last year are coming back as well like the raspberries, chives, mint, and flowers.
In late April, we planted potatoes, spinach, onions, radishes, and carrots. They have all started to sprout especially the radishes which needed to be thinned on the workday.
