Project Grow's Hoophouse

Project Grow's hoophouse build was June 29^th, from about 8:30 in the morning until well after 5:30pm. For the build, Project Grow collaborated with Selma Café, who builds hoophouses all over Southeast Michigan, and Dawn Farm, a residential treatment facility for drug addicts and alcoholics. The build was part of Selma's "20 hoops in 20 days" initiative and involved volunteers from all three organizations. Fourteen volunteers came on behalf of Project Grow and at least a dozen from Selma. Dawn Farm clients helped out, too, as did their staff. Dawn Farm also provided a buffet lunch and dinner, while Selma Café brought bagels and coffee to get everyone started.

Selma's Jeff McCabe was truly in his element, staying calm and patient with sometimes up to 30 volunteers at once. While many of the Selma volunteers had worked on other builds, and could often answer questions, Jeff was the one who kept everything going.  He was constantly calling for "a couple people looking for something to do" and getting them going on yet another part of the project.

While nearly the entire hoophouse was built in one day, there is still more to do. Dawn Farm is currently running power and water to the structure, and after that we still need to lay out the paths and prepare the beds inside. However, the toughest part requiring the most specialized knowledge is finished!

Why Does Project Grow Need a Hoophouse, Anyway?

For the past 5 or 6 years, Project Grow has grown seedlings for our plant sale at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. By having volunteers do all the work, we are able to raise seedlings organically and grow a huge selection of heirloom varieties in relatively small quantities. Commercial greenhouses do not grow things organically and balk at the idea of growing a few flats of this and a few flats of that, so growing our own is really the only option. In the past several years, Matthaei has begun renting their greenhouse space to more and more area non-profits. As a result, they have less and less available space. We "bump up" the seedlings twice prior to the sale, so the greenhouse space required is at first relatively small. By the time of the sale, however, the plants occupy 170 flats! Because the sale plants take up so much greenhouse space and were obviously causing problems for Matthaei, the Project Grow Board felt we needed to find alternative greenhouse space for 2012.  

Because Project Grow owns no land, we approached Dawn Farm about the possibility of building a greenhouse there. We chose Dawn Farm because it is a secure space (no worries about vandalism), and, like Project Grow, they are a non-profit and have been around since the 1970s (no worries about them moving or going away). The Farm's Facilities Manager said it might be most economical to build a hoophouse with Selma Cafe, and then partition and heat part of it to grow our seedlings. This is the route we eventually took.

The deal we arrived at was Project Grow paid for the hoophouse (about $7,000) and Dawn Farm agreed to pay for the utilities. In addition, Dawn Farm is paying to run power and a frost free water line to the hoophouse. To conserve energy, Project Grow plans to construct 3-to-4 foot high low tunnels within the hoophouse and heat those. We won't know for sure how well this will work until we actually try it, but we believe we will be able to grow all the plant sale plants in a few of these low tunnels, heating them for a few weeks with inexpensive electric heaters. By the time we begin transplanting the seedlings into the 3.5" pots that we sell, we think we will be able to rely on the hoophouse alone to keep out the frosts.  

After the plant sale, Dawn Farm will have complete use of the hoophouse from around June 1^st through March 1^st the following year. The Farm hopes to grow cold hardy greens over the winter and perhaps hot weather plants like, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in the summer. The Project Grow Board thought this was a good agreement that will benefit both organizations.  

Was My Plot Fee Used to Pay For This?

No. Plot fees were not used to fund the hoophouse. The cost of the hoophouse came from the Project Grow plant sale, which generates about $7,000 per year. Not only were plot fees not used to pay for the hoophouse, but the plant sale in fact lowers plot fees. For Project Grow to balance its budget without the revenue from the plant sale, fees on Project Grow gardens would have to increase about $20 per plot. The plant sale has been a boon to all Project Grow gardeners, whether they purchase plants at it or not.  

Bigger and Better Plant Sales

Because we now have more space, and will no longer be limited to weekday afternoons for our workdays, as we were at Matthaei, we hope to actually expand the plant sale. We have thought of offering more varieties of peppers and perhaps 4-packs of cabbages and other plants. If you would like to see us offer something new, please send your suggestions to kirk@projectgrowgardens.org.

Plant Sale Report

Project Grow started around 3,000 plants for this year's sale. We charge $3 each for all the plants. We sold $1,803 in advance orders, $5,856 on the two days of the sale at People's Food Co-op, and another $131 on half price left overs for a total of $7,790!  Anything we could not sell was donated to Brightmoor Garden in Detroit and to our own heirloom garden at Leslie Science Center.  Expenses are still not completely in, but in the past the sale has generated around $7,000 and we expect that is about what we will make this year

The plant sale is only possible with the support of a large number of volunteers who grow the plants, staff the sale, fill the pre-orders and so on.  These volunteers included:

Ashley Amick, Erin Biehl, Evan Boyd, Sevanne Demirjian, Tiere Emerson, Lucas DiGia, Deiatra Eudy, Inge Ferguson, Lisa Fletcher, Mary Gallagher, Jarckie Giletto, Janet Gettel, Denise Hackney, Ann Hartunian, Royer Held,  Kirk Jones, Mervyn Juchartz, Allison Kilgore, Joseph Kim, Jennifer Knight, Karl Longstreath, Anne Maynard, Chelsea Mercer, Eric Meves, Kris Meves, Monica Milla, Ellen Miller, Curtis Pettinger, Joet Roema, Ellen Rusten, Cindy Rutherford, Sarah Schleicher, Pamela Schwartzman, Karl Schwinghammer, Rachel Shevrin, Dari Stahl (and her husband!), Chris Strasser, Kathleen Strnad, Damaris Sufalko, Marcella Trautmann, Craig Urwin  

As you can see, the help of a huge number of people is involved in pulling this off, and our thanks go out to every one of them.  Please excuse us if we somehow missed your name. 

In addition, we especially want to thank all the customers who purchased the plants and helped to make this year's sale such a success. 

Advance Ordering

In yet more news on the the plant sale, the advance ordering we offered for the first time this year worked out very well. We sold more than a quarter of all the plants we grew with advance orders. There were small problems, and it took more time to pull together the orders than we expected, but things generally went very smoothly, especially since it was the first year we tried it. We plan to offer advance ordering again next year. Depending on volunteer help, customers may even be able to place their order online and pay for them using PayPal. We will keep everyone up to date on the plant sale in future newsletters.

Preserving your Harvest: A new series of Project Grow classes!

You've worked hard in your garden all spring and summer and it shows: you have big, beautiful, bountiful greens, peas, beans, or tomatoes, which you have been feasting on all season long. Very often, however, there is more to harvest than your family can eat and even your friends start to avoid you, for fear of receiving yet another armful of greens. Not to worry. This new series of classes is designed for you! We will cover two major ways of preserving your harvest: pickling vegetables, using lacto-fermentation principles, and drying your produce, using a dehydrator. The instructors are experienced Project Grow gardeners, who have learned how to deal with their bounty and are eager to pass their knowledge on to you. Come join us and learn how to preserve your harvest to enjoy throughout the winter.

We are also presenting a class on saving your own seeds. Learn how to preserve the plants that you are growing this season by collecting their seeds for growing out next spring.

If plans work out, we will also be presenting a class on canning tomatoes, using the water bath method, as well as one on making sauerkraut and/or kim chee. The latter is with David Klingenberger, of The Brinery, who offers his produce for sale at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market each Saturday. More about these two classes later.

Lacto-Fermented Vegetables: the Art of Pickling 

Saturday, August 6, from 10am-12 noon at the Nature House, Leslie Science Center, 1831Traver Road, Ann Arbor, 48105.

Learn creative ways to preserve your harvest. Receive instruction and hands-on experience, as well as taste samples of food preserved with lacto-fermentation. Class participants will prepare 1 quart of vegetables for fermentation at home. A selection of spices and a variety of vegetables will be available for you to create you own unique blend of pickles. Ge Zhang and Deiatra Eudy, both Project Grow gardeners, will lead the class, which is limited to 10 seats, so register early. Fee to cover the cost of supplies: $10.00

Saving Seeds from your Garden 

Saturday, August 13, from 10am - 11:30am, at the Nature House, Leslie Science Center, 1831 Traver Road, Ann Arbor, 48105.

Why spend money on seeds each year when you can learn how to gather your own, from plants that flourish in your garden? Our well-known organic gardener and instructor, Royer Held, will tell you how to do it. Hands-on experience in saving tomato seeds (and others, depending on what is available from his garden) will also be provided.

Dehydrating your Harvest  

Saturday, August 27, from 10am - 12 noon, at Leslie House, Leslie Science Center, 1831 Traver Road, Ann Arbor, 48105.

This class will cover the basics of drying foods, producing kale chips and dried tomatoes. But it will take dehydrating foods one more step to teach you how to make your own flax seed crackers, filled with vegetables and flavored with spices, that are not only tasty, but healthy! Participants will take home samples of dried foods. Food preservationists, Ge Zhang and Deiatra Eudy, will be teaching the course. Class size limited to 10 participants. Class fee: $10.00.

Tilling

We received about 40 responses to the e-mail we sent all the gardeners about their tilling preferences. For comparison, we received only 5 responses to our question about registration suggestions, so this is obviously a topic people care about.  At all the sites except Hunt and Wines, the majority opinion was to continue tilling in the Spring if possible. Various "open the garden without tilling" dates were suggested, with the average date being around May 15^th.

At Hunt Park, 3 out of 4 votes were to make the garden perennial, and at Wines, 2 out of 3 votes were to stop tilling entirely. We will look into the possibility of making these changes at these sites, depending on interest and how the landowners feel about it. Greenview wins the prize for the most voters (six) although Hunt and Wines probably had a higher percentage of gardeners vote.

People obviously feel very stongly about this question. One gardener wrote, "If we know that we will be able to garden as soon as the ground thaws in the spring, we could get a whole additional crop in the ground. The garden coordinators could mark off the sites as early as March 1^st, and those early birds among us - and there are a good handful of us - could get out there with spinach, arugula, leeks, parsnips, potatoes, peas, and all the cold-loving crops that we mostly missed this year because of the May start date." On the other hand, a gardener at another site said, "Clearly, you can tell that I believe in plowing a field for planting. Earthworms re-animate while the zillions of leaf eating eggs under the first few layers of soil are plowed under and can't kill baby plants."

There are perennial (no till) plots at many sites, and we encourage people who would like to do three season gardening to request these plots. If there are few or no perennial plots at your site (such is the case at Hunt and Wines), we may be able to make additional parts of the site perennial, if perennial gardens would be acceptable to the landowners. Please stay in touch with the your site coordinator about this, and asl your site coordinator to pass your wishes on to the Board.

At least half the responders thanked the Board for asking the gardener's opinion, and the Board would like to thank everyone who went to the trouble to respond.

Volunteer of the Month - Ellen Miller

Ellen first contacted us in response to the volunteer coordinator positions. We had already filled them when she contacted us, but I knew at that time that there must be something we could work with her on. Over the months since then Ellen has jumped at the chance to be involved with many projects. She shows initiative and is a self-starter, which we love! When she was willing to come to the Airport Garden and pull Comfrey in the rain, I knew we were lucky to have her. She has put in many hours, also volunteering at the Plant Sale and Hoop-house build. She has also agreed to coordinate our volunteer permaculture awareness group, and is currently researching grants we may be able to apply for to build a rainwater collection system. When we met to discuss this potential project, I found out that she has a strong interest in sustainability and securing healthy and local food access. We tapped into these interests when we asked her to lead a group of teens from the Neutral Zone through the gardens at the Leslie Science Center. What takes the cake is that this was a last minute visit with little to no preparation. All we were able to offer was one three way phone call the night before and a google document the day of! In spite of this last-minute effort, Ellen jumped in head first and took on the challenge. I received great feedback from the counselors, and we got some much needed weeding done:) Thank you so much for the enthusiasm and hard work you bring to the team Ellen!

Tomato Tastings! 

Project Grow will again hold two Tomato Tastings this year so everyone you can enjoy both early and late varieites. We plan to hold the first tasting on Saturday August 21^st from 10am to noon at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market. We have not finalized this date yet, but we will send everyone a reminder e-mail closer to the date. The second tasting will be part of the HomeGrown festival and will be held on Saturday September 10^th from 6pm to 9pm (if the tomatoes hold out).

These  tastings are one-of-a-kind opportunities to taste dozens of tomato varieties side by side. It is all well and good to read that a tomato is high acid or spicy in January, when even the best supermarket tomatoes are...well...awful. However, these descriptions take on real meaning when you just tasted a tomato that was low acid and the one before that was citrusy. Please joins us at the tastings and see for youself!

The Compost Education Center Inaugural Class!

This was a big weekend for the Compost Education Center! Joet Reoma, our "CEC" coordinator, organized a team of volunteers to assemble a 3-bin compost system and a worm bin on Friday night. This project was completed quickly due to Joet's excellent planning and preparation. Some of the volunteers took a trip to his nearby home to pick up supplies and were happy to report that Joet is growing bamboo in his backyard!