Buying Seeds and Planting Starts

 Hello!

This week, myself and other students have done great work moving our plans for a vegetable garden forward. I met with my fellow Rosegrow students Pearl, Gianna, Mark, Tori and Lucy, and one of our faculty advisors Prof. Joanne Campbell, to buy organic vegetable seeds, soil, and supplements. The garden areas have been mapped out and approved, and we planned to start our seedlings in ice cream cones and egg cartons on Monday. Ice cream cones and egg cartons are both biodegradable, so the idea is that seedling may be started in doors in these containers and transferred directly into the earth after the risk of a hard frost has passed; in our corner of the world, this is typically after Mother's Day. We were grateful to be able to buy these supplies with money donated for the Patrick Herman Vegetable Garden, and excited to get to work making our campus and our world a more beautiful place. 

We are able to successfully acquire all of the supplies that we needed to begin to get our garden underway!

Monday, March 17th, was St. Patrick's Day, and the day of our dear friend Patrick Herman's memorial service. His memorial service took place at 12pm, and we wanted to get our seeds started in the morning before hand, so that when the family came to visit the site of the vegetable garden, they could see what vegetables we had planted, and how we were utilizing the greenhouse so far (despite it's current lack of electricity). We planned, as Rosegrow, to meet in the Gertrude Kistler Memorial Library at 10am, and to plant those vegetable seeds! We had already sorted the seeds into those that could be started now, and those which we want to start later in the summer, to make sure that we had produce throughout the summer, and had a good harvest left to share at our campus wide Octoberfest next semester! 

I was thrilled when it was not just Rosegrow students who came, but an entire section of Rosemont's Introduction to Sustainability course! They were a great help in ensuring all of our seeds got planted properly and in a timely manner, and it was lovely to have such a large group of students working together, as well as sustainability professor Radley Reist! 

Prof. Reist gallantly volunteered to fill all our containers with dirt, as we were planting outside, at the site of the future vegetable garden. 

It was a great joy to get to share our project with more of the Rosemont community and get more students and faculty involved in what we're working on, and I was surprised and excited, as I have continually been, by this outpouring of support to make a better planet. 

After starting our seeds, we took the containers up to the greenhouse. Prof. Campbell and Campus Minister Eric Starrs had spent some time cleaning up the greenhouse while we planted. Our greenhouse is still in progress, but, as temperatures at night are no longer so deeply cold, it is warm enough (even without electricity) to support our new baby vegetables. It also offered us the oppo
rtunity to show the greenhouse to those students who hadn't seen it yet, and invite everyone to come help us work on completing it's restoration at our campus wide earth day climate teach-in! 

After other students had left, Pearl Smith, Prof. Campbell and myself stayed behind to organize the seedling and in the greenhouse, and clean it up a little bit more, so that it would be able to visited by Patrick Herman's family later that day. 

We are SO thrilled with the progress made so far! As spring is beginning, we have more and more people dedicated to this project, and all of their passion and love is evident in the work that has been able to take place to date! 

Check back for more updates on this and our other projects, 

Xx Mia Hoppel, Sustainability Intern