Elisabeth

Public welcome to this family-friendly, free, self-guided tour
Saturday, September 29, 2018 – 11 AM to 2 PM
Seven Locations Around Arlington, Massachusetts
Visit seven beautiful public gardens, each offering lessons in environmental sustainability

Join us on Arlington’s self-guided walking tour to explore and learn about (and from) some of our beautiful public gardens! You will get a chance to visit a wide array of locations, from the Cyrus E. Dallin Elementary School gardens to the community space of Magnolia Gardens. This event is a great way to hear from local gardeners, pick up new planting methods, and learn about the gardening opportunities provided by the town of Arlington. Free admission, all ages welcome. We hope to see you there!

Tell us you’re coming and share this event on Facebook, #AnOutdoorEducation

Maps of the event will be available (coming soon) or at any of the stops along the tour:
Robbins Farm Learning Garden – all kinds of vegetables will be ripening
Dallin School Green Team garden – includes backyard composting demo/Q&A by Jeremy Marin at 12:30 PM , and “Meet the Hawk” by Arlington’s Animal Control Officer Diane Welch at 11:00 AM
Hurd Field Rain Garden – includes Stormwater Awareness activities for the family with DPW’s Jack Turner
Arlington Reservoir’s Habitat Garden -see native plantings in their fall glory
Bishop School learning garden and Green Team pollinator garden– includes “Meet the Hawk” by Arlington’s Animal Control Officer Diane Welch at 1:00 PM,find out how Bishop is integrating gardening into their curriculum
Arlington’s new orchard – a hidden gem
Magnolia Community Garden – tour the newly-expanded Arlington Recreation community garden, includes a lesson on backyard composting best practices with garden compost coordinators Allie and Steven

Our first harvest of Sugar Dumpling squash and Baby Bear pumpkins of the season.

The first Saturday in July ushered in our first major harvest of beets, eggplant, peppers, potatoes and zucchini. The tomatoes aren’t far behind!

We’ve been starting our cucurbit (squash family) seeds indoors under lights to get a leg up on the season for a few years. Last year, we noticed that the germination rate for these seeds was unusually poor. This was brought into painful focus when only 1 of 33 of our Baby Bear pumpkin seeds germinated. A clue presented itself when we noticed that this pumpkin variety was the only one of our cucurbit seeds that was offered as treated seed.

Following our notes from last year, we started all our cucurbits in sterile soil this year. The results are now in, and they are striking. The one-to-one comparisons are shown in the table below. Each of the varieties shown were grown under the same conditions from the same seed from the same source for that year (2017 for non-sterile and 2018 for sterile).

[It’s important to note that we start most of our indoor seeds in sterile soil. In fact, we sterilize compost and make our own soil mix using coir, sand, vermiculite, wood ash and organic fertilizer. However, we decided to risk the non-sterile mix for the cucurbits because we start them just 2 weeks before they’re planted in the garden and they seem like such robust seeds.]

On average for all the cucurbit seed, the germination rate went from 53% for non-sterile soil to 94% for sterile soil. As for the pumpkins, we opted for the treated seed this year… and the germination rate went from 3% to 83%.

The newly-transplanted tomatoes, eggplants and okra are seeing real sun for the first time today in the greenhouse. They will be ready to go outside and get full sun soon, in preparation for being planted in the garden. We will have well over 100 seedlings (including all the wonderful peppers, tomatillos and basil) when planting day comes…

After a long cold winter, it’s finally time to work at the garden again. We will resume our regular Saturday hours (9 to noon) and hope to catch up with our planting, harvesting and cleaning up.

We look forward to seeing you there!