Green Gal

Who else is ready for the weather to warm up the soil for our spring gardens? I've spent so many hours looking at seed catalogs and seed packets lately, I just can't wait for tomatoes and peppers! Despite the cool temperatures lately, the 2018 growing season has officially begun for Green Gal's Garden! We sowed our first round of seeds on February 18, including three varieties of basil and one variety of cauliflower. The first seedlings sprouted up out of the soil on February 24, and more continue to sprout and grow happily in their little cells of potting soil. I'm planting another round of seeds this week, and I finally finished my crop plan (just yesterday actually!) so now I have a schedule of what's getting planted when and how much and when it'll eventually get transplanted and then harvested. I printed it out to have a physical copy to refer to (see below), but it will be a living document on the computer that will get updated and changed as the ...

It's been almost 3 months since I said goodbye to my beautiful farm-ily and graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Farm Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture. Life since then has been a whirlwind of organizing to-do lists and timelines, adjusting to more screen time, balancing new responsibilities and projects without the structure of a 9-5 job, and reflecting on this past growing season of learning, growth, and community. Since October when I packed up my tent cabin overlooking Monterey Bay and closed a profound chapter of my life, the ideas that had sprouted into dreams and were woven into goals during my time at the UCSC Farm soon became integral to the fabric of my daily life. The vision I crafted as I dug potatoes and planted ranunculus and cooked meals for 45 of my favorite people has begun manifesting as tangible stepping stones into the future, each leading to deeper understanding of the purpose and potential of those dreams. No doubt, I have days when fear makes m...

This post is part of an ongoing series called "Mapping History." Get the backstory here . My first entry in this series focused on one quote about the "most desirable" part of Santa Clara Valley according to the author of Santa Clara County California , published in 1887 by the Santa Clara County Board of Trade. In this second entry, I've pulled out some more of the quotes that demonstrate the significance of agriculture in this region as the basis for its rapid growth at the time the book was written. Before I share the quotes, I want to explain that this book opens with a discussion of the geologic history of the region and then goes into its climate and soil as a foundation for why agriculture is so lucrative here. From the beginning, nearly the entire book focuses on the ideal climate of the valley and the fact that almost anything can be grown. Agricultural productivity is the main argument throughout the book for why easterners should move here and p...

Maps fascinate me. Anyone who's ever used a map knows that it's basic function is to show us the geographical and spatial relationships between physical places, which provides us with useful knowledge for getting from one place to another. In today's modern world of smartphones and computers, most people interact with maps in a very different way than people have for millennia. We can type in or tell Siri our destination and starting point and then be told--without even looking at the map ourselves--how to utilize the streetscape of our world to get to our destination in the most direct route. This is useful, sure, but we miss something when we let Siri tell us the way, and that something is the very thing about maps that fascinates me most. When we pull out a paper map or zoom out on Google Maps to view more than just where the GPS reminds us we are at that moment, we can learn so much about a place through its spatial organization. Culture, history, natural features, po...