Weeding, growing and building!

Wow, what a productive week! So much has been going on in the Norman Johnston gardens! It's been such a gorgeous week weather-wise so the students have been busy outside working at building garden beds, weeding and planning.

There is a lot of work to do in our Traditional Indigenous Healing garden and the students have been hard at work making sure that all spokes of the wheel are weeded and that there is lots of room for the sacred plants to grow. 

A look at our Healing Garden
(the spokes include 4 sacred plants
 with great healing power -
sage, sweetgrass, cedar and tobacco)

Weeding our Traditional Indigenous Healing Garden

Students have done an amazing job at dividing our biggest bed into square feet so that we can plan what to grow in each square. 

Radishes have been the quickest
to germinate! It looks great with
16 radish plants per square foot!

The "H" bed all measured and divided up with labels
as to what was planted in each square! Some of these
squares are dedicated to transplants that we will be planting
next week or the week after.

Students are measuring out one of our new garden beds and dividing this into square feet as well! We have built all three of our new garden beds and filled them with soil.  This was hard work but they look great! Thank you to Growing Up Organic for providing us with the lumber, hardware and soil to make this happen!

Measuring out one of our new garden beds

Our strawberry patch is doing wonderfully! We're hoping that there will be a lot of strawberries for all of the students to enjoy soon! Using some rebar, plastic PVC piping, twine and netting we were able to build a hoop house to protect our strawberries from hungry animals and birds (but still leaving room for pollinators to get at the flowers). This was a really fun project! We're hoping to build similar structures over our other garden beds to put frost blankets over in the fall to extend our growing season!

A look at our new hoop house to protect our strawberry patch.
In behind the strawberry patch is two more of our new garden beds!

 Thanks for reading! We hope everyone has a wonderful long weekend!