Day 2: Cool Beans

        Today, Josie and I met Anne at the newest plot, made just a few weeks ago, on crescent street. Our project for the day involved building large wooden structures that will support the growth of the beans that we plant. Some of the wood pieces we were using were collected from a beaver dam and therefore already magnificently sharpened and ready to be dug into the ground. Other pieces were kindly sharpened by the lot owner. We started by putting together two wooden pieces to form a kind of triangle and then dug them deep into the ground; first by digging a hole and placing them in it, and then continuing by hammering them even further into the ground to assure stability. Once we got about four pairs done we nailed each pair of sticks together using a drill. Finally, we placed more wooden sticks across the top of the triangles. You can probably get a better idea of what this looks like by referring to the picture below. After we finished this we planted the little baby beans about an inch into the soil and approximately a hand length apart! Farewell little beans! Happy growing and see you soon J. Before we left the Crescent plot we spread a generous amount of compost onto each of the remaining beds so that soil is full of nutrients and ready to grow some vegetables for when we come back to plant some more!

        Interesting thought of the day: It is unfortunate that no matter how hard we try, some kind of artificial products or chemicals will always find their way into the soil and, consequently, our food. The water used at a lot of the plots, other than rain barrel water, is just city water which contains traces of chlorine in it. Although, rainwater will also contain various chemical compounds due to regular air pollutants. In the compost, that we get from the city as well, there are visible pieces of plastic. This is the simple result of people throwing plastic items into their composters at home. Therefore, in today's reality we still have to deal with things like bits of plastic and chemicals that seem to be unavoidable.

Josie and Anne drilling together some wood pieces 

adding compost to the beds

see ya soon little bean!

Once we finished at crescent we continued to Brook Street/Anne’s beautiful home. Here, we made another wooden piece for the beans, except this time we added rope going from the top of the structure to the bottom of it, vertically, so that the beans have something to wrap around when they begin to grow. Ropes will also be added to the beans at Crescent. 

Final product at Brooke street plot