April's Garden
Chocolate zucchini bread, recipe below plus tips on how to make it.
Some basil before I planted it a while back.
Intern Profile
Two of my personal goals for working at the Dallas Youth Garden this summer are:
Have my Garden go well. And let my Leadership projects go exceedingly.
Two things I hope to learn for working at the Dallas Youth Garden are:
How to work with bees (As I am one of the 4 working with bees)
How to make a successful garden.
I think my biggest challenge will be:
My favorite vegetable is:
Broccoli
My least favorite garden task is:
Watering
My most favorite garden task is:
Picking the fruits/vegetables
I think a leader is:
Someone who does not take pleasure in being above others and can successfully guide others, not control them.
My worst leadership skill or trait is:
Shyness, I can clam up if I get to nervous or shy. (This is lessening rapidly!)
My best leadership skill or trait is:
Authority, according to two of my friends. Essentially what I mean is being able to get people to do their work, and not goof off. (At one point they were scared of me, I got mad cause they goofed off in class and wouldn't work on our projects.)
Garden Plan:
My favorite plant to plant was:
Lettuce, it is a small seed, so it is quick to plant.
My lease favorite plan to plant was:
Onions, pulling them apart was hard, and I killed some...
I think my plan worked because:
All of my plants are growing nicely.
Garden Log:
May 14-31: Planting, watering, weeding.
June 2: Making paths.
June 7: Mulching
June 9: Planning thing for the gardens, leadership projects, and filling out some paperwork. (Pretty lax day)
June 12-16: Some more mulching
June 19: Finished mulching!
June 21: Helped others mulch
June 23: Helped others mulch, and Mr. Dean helped us fix some water spout things.
June 25: Went around and helped with gardens.
June 28: Watered and weeded
June 30: Watered and weeded
July 2: Watered, Weeded, and helped Andy
July 13-22: Vacation
July 23: Watered, did minions, weeded, talked about leadership
July 26: Open house
July 28: Watered, weeded, picked
July 30: Half day, I stayed the extra hour to make up time.
August 2: Watered, picked biggest harvest iv had yet!)
August 4: Watered weeded talked about fair harvested
August 6: Watered weeded talked about fair harvested
August 9: Watered weeded harvested
August 11: Missed this day (showing my turkey and chicken at fair), made up for it the day before by helping cut flowers.
August 13: Watered, harvested talked about what we got from fair (I got top intermediate vegetable exhibit! Whoop!)
August 16: Watered weeded, harvested talked about state fair
August 18: Watered weeded harvested talked a bit more about state fair
August 20: Watered weeded and harvested for fair.
August 23: Watered weeded harvested
August 25: Watered weeded harvested
August 27: Watered weeded harvested and moved some wood and tarps. I found and moved a snake too.
August 29: Watered weeded harvested talked
Leadership Projects:
Bees
Problem: How do bees help the garden?
Solution: Research them.
Document Results: Bees are pollinators, one of the most important pollinators in fact, and can spend up to 10 hours a day going from one flower to the next.
A reason your need pollinators is because without a pollinator of some kind most plants will not bear large fruits, if any, nor will they create viable seeds. Okay, but why use bees when your could use butterflies, flies, or hummingbirds? That’s because butterflies and flies don’t have the body structure that bees do too collect the pollen and move it from plant to plant as easily.
Communication: Explaining this to other people.
Leadership: Effective Communication
Summer Fest:
At summer fest I helped at the master gardeners booth. They had me talk to people about what the Dallas Youth Gardens is about, an afterwards I would make a tally mark saying that I talked to another person. It was a interesting experience, and a little hard since I am not the best at talking to random people. But it was fun none the less.
Chocolate Zucchini Bread:
Problem: We need to know and communicate how produce grown in our garden can be prepared.
Solution: Take produce home, find a recipe you like, prepare produce bring it back.
Recipe: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_zucchini_bread/
Communication: I made a chocolate zucchini bread, which tastes a bit like brownies. In the recipe I found that if you dont want to pick out seeds one by one, to cut out the middle after cutting the zucchini into 6ths. Also I found that switching the almond extract for vanilla works well. I also thickened up the batter (which is like cake batter) with more chocolate and a bit more flour. I also used some cooking spray and flour to coat the pans, although instead of flour next time ill use cocoa powder.
Leadership: Communication
Nightshade:
The members of the nightshade are things we eat fairly often. Some of them being potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers (eg. bell peppers), tomatillos, goji berries, tobacco, paprika, red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper… Etc.
Those are the ‘safe’ to eat ones. One of the unsafe ones is called belladonna, this being the most well known.
The plants are mostly safe for people to eat, but people with bad digestive systems or sensitivity to nightshade can often have bad reactions to them. The plant with that people often react worst to would be potatoes. They have two glycoalkaloids in them, one that is called alpha-chaconine and the other is alpha-solanine. These are the two most toxic glycoalkaloids found in nightshade. Raw potatoes, potato berries (which often look like tomatoes), and potato leaves often kill livestock. People don't often eat these, but there are multiple documented cases of people getting glycoalkaloids-poisoning from improperly stored potatoes. Low doses can often cause symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea, but high doses can cause fever, low blood pressure, confusion, and other neurological problems. And at very high doses, glycoalkaloids are fatal. Most of the glycoalkaloid is in the potato skin, so peel your potatoes and you should be mainly okay.
The other plants are much less of a problem, such as tomatoes. Tomatoes are 20 times less toxic than potatoes. And the redder they are (or more ripened.) the less glycoalkaloids they have in them. They did a study on mice and found out that it would take about 15000 lbs of tomatoes to kill a mighty 150 lbs mouse, but with eggplant it would only take 13 lbs. So if you're trying to kill a monster mouse, choose the eggplant. Though unlike with the potato, the eggplant glycoalkaloids is mostly in its seeds and flesh. Very little in the skin.
Peppers and other things that were mentioned above don’t contain very much, if you react badly to them then you are highly reactive. Goji berries I could not find any info on…
Nightshades also have traces of nicotine in them, though other than in tobacco it is very slight. Glycoalkaloids and nicotine do not die out from being cooked. In fact glycoalkaloids thrive when you cook them.
(I had fun researching this one, almost added more, but decided against it.)
Ladybugs:
One way to attract ladybugs to your garden is to have lots of pollen and bugs in your garden. Some plants the ladybugs love are chives, marigold and dill. The other thing that will keep them in your garden is bugs. Mainly aphids. While you may not want aphids in your garden, it will keep the ladybugs in your garden. But to solve the problem of aphids being in your garden, use decoy plants. Using Early cabbage, Marigold, Nasturtium (These are aphids’ favorite) or Radish you can lure the bugs away from other plants. Other ways is to create ladybug houses for them, or placing a shallow plate of water out for them.
My garden:
