RFHS Garden - First Summer 2011

RFHS Grain Trials, Summer 2011

Summer 2011 saw the beginning of the 1/2 acre garden outside of the Growing Dome. Students learned while helping Mary to compost, layer materials and build planting rows in the garden, build temporary row covers for early Spring starts, and plant the first grain trials around the dome.
Some of the produce harvested from the dome and garden this Summer was sold to the Carbondale Food Coop, our first earned income!
Most of the vegetables and grains raised in the garden this Summer were harvested and integrated into the cafeteria kitchen, or processed and frozen for later use. Two Aspen High School graduates, volunteering at the Permaculture Institute before attending Prescott College for agricultural sciences, harvested the rye and the hard red winter wheat grains, threshing the grains from the chaff using a push mower on a mesh picnic table, with a sheet of plywood underneath to collect the grains. They netted nearly 50 lbs of rye and wheat.
Mary Cervantes did a great job with the plants in the Growing Dome and Garden last school year and this Summer, and she left everything is good condition for her successor.
Hadley Hentschel and his students have been putting the outside beds into hibernation mode for Winter, after mulching lots of decaying plant material over the soil, to enrich them for next year. The annual beds in the dome have been harvested, mulched and replanted with Winter greens and vegetables.

Spring 2011 - Beginning the outside garden

Salad greens, Summer 2011

Wheat and Rye

Annuals and Grain north of the Grow Dome

Annuals garden south of the Grow Dome

Sunflowers and salad greens

Edible flowers and herbs in the Grow Dome

Jerome Osentowski inspects plant health in the Grow Dome

Fava beans from the Grow Dome, Spring 2011

Planting beds in the Grow Dome