ADK Sustainability Course and July Garden Update

This month, we took a little time away from the garden and spent a week in the Adirondacks teaching a field-based graduate course that included sustainability topics - things the students can use in both their personal and professional lives as well as what to include in their classroom (since most of the students were teachers). To see what we did, you can look at the course blog. We had a great group of students/teachers who, as you can read from their blogs which are linked to the course blog, are excited about focusing more on local foods, looking to join a CSA, and thinking about ways to incorporate the outdoors and sustainability topics into their classrooms.

So far it has been a fairly cool, damp summer. Our garden along with the fruit trees and shrubs are keeping us occupied. While walking the paths through our fields to pick wild raspberries, the scent of milkweed was sweet in the air. The wild flowers, especially the daisies, are having a banner year!

In addition to lots of weeds (most inedible) that seem to always grow well, we are managing to get a few things to eat from the garden. This is what is available to eat from the garden today:

Onions
Early Cabbage
Carrots
Beets
Peas
Broccoli
Swiss Chard
Lettuce
Turnips
Kohlrabi
Radishes

Coming in soon we should be adding:
New Potatoes
Zucchini
Red Cabbage
Royal Burgundy Beans

And a little slower this year:
Tomatoes (will they ever turn red?)
Eggplant
Cucumbers (I got a late start on these)
Brussels Sprouts
Pole Beans and Bush Green Beans (having a hard time this year and also a late start)
Winter squash (also having a hard time this year and also a late start)

Celery, late season cabbage, garlic, potatoes, shallots, and popcorn are all doing very well. This week I need to plant our winter or storage root vegetables. This would include beets, carrots, and turnips. And I also need to plant some late season broccoli and peas.

Our blueberries are just starting to come in. Especially those we just transplanted which were given to us by our friends Rand and Sharon Johnson in Chenango County. Along with the wild raspberries, our cultivated raspberries and black raspberries are ripening. Mulberries have been ripening a few at a time for the last week and we still have some strawberries ripening as well.

Because of the weather, which climate scientists predict will be come the norm for Upstate New York (as wetter, cooler summers are predicted as our climate changes), we are considering high tunnels and a larger greenhouse to get things going sooner and longer. By the way, as you can see by the article I linked to above, it is predicted that our winters will be what warms more significantly, less snowfall, less days below freezing. For some, you are probably saying, "Great, I don't have to move to Virginia for the milder winter weather. It will come to me". But along with these milder winters, we'll see more ticks and other insects and more invasive species. We'll see less blueberries, less maple trees, and even less apples. And also wet summer weather may be pretty dramatic, in other words more flooding, more often. That isn't even discussing the ocean level rise, which will force the relocation of millions of people downstate to probably, well, here I guess . . .