Deadline is Monday (March 1) to order seed packets being sold as a fund-raiser for the 4-H Community Garden. The program enters its second year of engaging students in grades four through six in the art and science of gardening, botany and horticulture. Last summer, the students planted, fertilized, weeded, harvested, sold their produce, and donated shares to a local facility.
Rotations, composting, and cover crops are being used to move the garden toward organic certification. A weather station has been installed to relate growing degree-days, insect degree-days, and disease occurrences to crop phenology.
Students experience hands-on the stages of plants, timing of insect arrivals, fungal diseases, pollination processes, cover crops, and the role of crop rotations in soil health and quality. The students have begun a pollinator garden and the aisles between the grapes in the main garden will feature cover crops that are attractive to honeybees.
The students would appreciate support through the purchase of seed packages. Catalogs and order forms are available at Cooperative Extension on Mapleview Lane, 274-8540. Contact person is Extension Educator Carrie Bowman (cbb136@psu.edu).
(Photo courtesy of Endeavor News shows, from left, front — Ben Cornish and Sara Cornish; back — Trevor Olney, Kevin Johnson and Carter Tuttle.)
