The State Fair

The Florida State Fair is coming up soon! We're planning on going February 7, and we're very excited. There should be plenty of agricultural, art, and craft exhibits, and of course, fried foods on a stick. I've never been before, but Taylor remembers it being pretty cool.

Shell-less eggs

As more of our chickens start laying, we're seeing some really weird eggs. So far we've found two that are completely missing shells. One I squished as I blindly reached into the nesting box, and another was laying on the floor of the coop. It's the weirdest thing, and you surely won't find them in the grocery store!

Almost like fall

The cold weather around here has caused a bunch of the leaves on the trees to fall off. The sweetgum has dropped leaves all over the place, and they make a wonderful crunchy sound when we walk all over the yard. Living in Florida, it's the closest we'll ever come to fall.

Grubs in the Garden

We found a bunch of these beetle grubs in the garden while we were double digging. They eat rotting wood, and there were plenty of old rotting roots in the area. We fed some of them to the chickens, who found them quite scrumptious.

Free county compost

We've recently added an additional 320 square feet of garden space outside, which is awesome. The only problem? The soil is sugar sand. It's nearly white. We think it may have once been a beach, because we've found all kind of shells and oceanic things under the grass. It's the sunniest location on the property, but it's going to need work before we can really do anything with it.

Mr. Dennis told us that the county offered free mulch and compost, and we decided to investigate. There are five locations around Sarasota county that offer free compost for home use, and there's a ton of it. The local park down the street has a huge compost pile, and it's less than three miles from the house. There's going to be residual pesticides and fertilizers, but we don't think it'll be more than you find in the average lawn. We'll go investigate, and if it seems okay, we might go ahead and use it in our front bed.

Some lessons learned

Right now there's not much happening in the garden. We're waiting for seedlings to grow, and don't have much day-to-day maintenance. We've been using this as a time to reflect on our successes and failures over the past eight months, and we feel like we've learned an enormous amount. The most important lessons?

Patience. Whether it's waiting for hens to start laying, seedlings to come up, or not rushing through a weeding job, patience is perhaps the most important skill we've come to work on. Sometimes things seem to take forever--- it was months before we got so much as a single collard to try, and we've had far more failures than successes.

Persistence. Sometimes stuff just doesn't work out as quickly or as easily as we'd hoped. We kept trying different crops, different planting times, different locations, and we've finally found something that sort of works. There's definitely room for improvement, but at least we've made it this far.

Planting times really matter. At first we kind of figured we could follow some vague guidelines, but realistically, a lot of the recommendations are pretty darn close to correct. It's very very important, especially in Florida, to pay attention to local seasonal planting guides. There's a pretty darn good one in "Vegetable Gardening in Florida". I'm not a fan of the rest of the book, which advocates fertilizers and pesticides out the wazoo, but definitely get it for the planting chart and local variety recommendations.

Takin' the bus

Last semester, a group of city-planners came to talk with my Environmental Issues class to discuss future transportation plans in Sarasota. They wanted student feedback, knowing that many of us represented some more environmentally-concious citizens that would have suggestions beyond new traffic lights and expanding roads. Unanimous among our class, we advocated safer roads for bicyclists, as well as more improved public transportation. Starting in January, SCAT agreed to give all students of local schools unlimited access to the bus system for a one-time payment (I think it came out to $1000, which was taken out of our student fee account). So far, the local busses have seen over 500 visits from New College students, with that number rising each day. To get on, we just scan our student ID and take a seat.

I've started taking the bus to school each day. There's a bus stop five minutes from my house that gets a straight trip right to campus once an hour. I do have to arrange my schedule a little bit differently, and every once in a while I have to wait on campus nearly an hour for the next bus, but it's a wonderful time to catch up on my reading. I'm so glad that New College has taken this initiative, and hope it continues into next year!