I am a master of science . . .

. . . officially.

Now this happens.

Check out my booty!

Behold the perks of going to an ag school:



The housemates and I are having a pumpkin-carving party this week and I decided that there must be a way for us to do this for free. So I called up the professor I used to TA for (who also gave me a season's worth of veggie transplants for free . . . twice). In exchange for driving a van on one of his class field trips, I was able to go on said field trip and pick all of this booty. For free.



Four watermelons, two winter squash, a few pounds of grapes, a bag full of walnuts, and seven pumpkins. Stay tuned for the results of our carving!

MY MASTER PLAN

My master's degree is almost finished. After one last meeting with my committee today, I will do a final edit and hand that sucker in.

So now what?

It's been a crazy couple of years out here in California. A lot has changed, but at heart, most things have stayed the same.

I came here with a love of environmental education, but with the aim to concentrate my studies in horticulture research, native plants, and habitat restoration. And I did that, for a while.

But the education side kept creeping back into my life. First with a series of T.A. jobs. Then with the "Kids in the Garden" program. And I've found that I just can't shake it.

So what have the last few years taught me? Above all, I've learned that my heart knows what I want, and my brain tends to get in the way. I've learned to refocus my efforts on environmental education with an eye for garden education and local food/nutrition outreach. The Bay Area leads the country in garden-based education, and I've been doing my best to learn as much as possible before leaving.

And I will be leaving, in about one month. I will be returning to Philadelphia, where I did my undergraduate education, and where M is still living. Philly is fast becoming the next big thing in garden and environmental education and outreach. Plus, I miss it.

I'm currently looking for a job in environmental education (I have one potential, keep your fingers crossed!). But my master plan is to open a community garden and education center in West Philadelphia, where I will be living.

This is a long-term project, and I expect it to progress slowly. But I will take you along for the ride. Thanks for coming this far with me!

Procrastination Station

After a last minute crisis (erasing three days of work, go me!) the second draft of my thesis is ready to be subjected to the red pen.

The looming deadline also meant that I found many ways to procrastinate. All of a sudden there were so many dishes to do, crafts to make, movies to watch, and internets to surf. Here are a few of my favorites:

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Vice Magazine Do's and Don'ts
• Softies Central
• Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day
• Jackson Browne
• Cold Splinters
  

The Salad Bowl Garden - Winter/Spring Season

This past spring I was a busy little bee. Almost literally. I worked on my research, worked as a botanical consultant, volunteered with the Kids in the Garden program, and helped design and plant a garden on campus.

The PES Salad Bowl Garden.



My friend Mags came up with the idea and got the grant money from UCD to carry it out. She has a lot of experience with "biointensive" food gardening, having lived and worked in Willits, CA learning mini-farming from John Jeavons. (We used his book, "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine," and it was indispensable).



The concept of our garden is based on French-style potager gardens which are basically kitchen gardens with an emphasis on vegetables that are designed for aesthetics. Our goal was to grow ready-to-eat food for the students, staff, and faculty who work in the PES building.



We were given six large beds in the courtyard of the PES building (Plant and Environmental Sciences), which was five more beds than we thought we would get! The beds have an irrigation system and we were assigned a groundskeeper, Bryan, to help us with weeding and keeping everything tidy.



We designed the garden in the winter and had a whole weekend planting party in March to double-dig the beds, put in the concrete paths, and plant the seedlings.



It took us 6 hours to put in these paths! The paths are designed to make the largest beds at the end of the path more accessible, so people won't have to step into the garden to harvest the veggies. They also allow us to divide the garden into sections for different colors/varieties of vegetables.

We decided to make the facing beds mirror image. In the smallest beds closest to the door we planted spinach, bunching onions, and snap peas.



In the middle beds we planted bok choi, Asian mustard, fennel, cilantro, and arugula.



In the largest beds (with paths) we planted many different types of lettuce, with different colors in each diamond. We also planted pak choi and snap peas. Throughout the gardens there are edible flowers like calendula, nasturtium, and pansies, as well as herbs and chives.



The garden is entirely organic, and we took shifts watering it by hand for a long time. We also put bird netting over it for a while, because of a healthy fear of rabbits.



Here are the small and medium beds after only a month or so of growth!!





We put informative signage up so everyone knew what was growing. That was mostly for me because I'm always looking at plants and wishing there were signs so I knew what I was seeing. I guess going to college on an arboretum does that to you.

When the garden was ready, we had harvest days where everyone from the PES building was invited to come pick and eat a salad for lunch. We supplied buckets of water for washing, a salad spinner, dressing, salt and pepper. They brought their bowls and forks. And we all ate up.






YUM! I've never been one to eat much salad to be honest. But I am now a devotee. I also found my new favorite dressing: Annie's Lemon and Chive.

We tore out the bolting plants in May and planted a spring/summer garden that is going strong. I've taken lots of pictures, so look out for a post about that garden soon!

Californitucky

I'm taking a Plant Conservation class this quarter, and we recently went out to northern Napa county to a preserve up there that allows OHVs (off highway vehicles) and also has a shooting range.

The rain let up for the whole day, we could hardly believe it.





OHVs can cause devastating erosion in areas where their use isn't regulated. And the regulation commission for them is also kind of hard-pressed to enforce regulations due to underfunding and biased interests (a majority of the board are OHV users).



We also went out there because the site has a lot of serpentine areas; the soils are full of heavy metals because the area was formed from deep ocean rocks that are high in magnesium and low in calcium. It's a fascinating ecosystem of plants that have adapted to these strange nutrient levels.



There was also a gold mine on the site that is now closed. The pit was pretty small, considering. And my professor said that they only made a profit margin of 2% the whole time they were there. Hmmmm, good riddance.





I'm taking some other pretty cool classes this quarter, so stay tuned to learn about them soon!

"The Office"

I think I've mentioned before that my office on campus is a hole-in-the-wall with six desks, and that only myself and an ecology grad student, Todd, are ever there. Well, we've been spending a lot of time there recently, and we've decided that something must be done to brighten the room.



I've been elected "decorating committee" and I started by bring some gerberas up from the greenhouses at ENH. Notice how I've kept the nerdy science vibe going by putting them in an Erlenmeyer flask.



We've also added Buddhist prayer flags and some plants, and I hope to add some paintings/posters to the wall soon. It won't be the prettiest room ever, but at least it will be livable. I'll keep you updated with the progress. I think Barry Zito is going to have a new home there too.

Jepson Herbarium

My trip to the Jepson Herbarium at UC Berkeley on Monday was pretty cool, even though I didn't find exactly what I was hoping to find. But I got to go behind the scenes and look through Lawrence Heckard's files, including his field collection notebooks. They were really interesting to read because they are basically a chronicle of every single plant collection trip he went on from the early 40's to the early 90's. I could see how his writing style changed, his shorthand developed, and how different people came in and out of his life, simply from reading those little old notebooks.



So I spent the day taking notes, and searching through the herbarium vouchers trying to piece together exactly how he and Tsan Iang Chuang germinated Cordylanthus palmatus back in the 60s and 70s. Through some clever sleuthing I figured out one or two things that might help me, but it remains to be seen whether I can do anything with the information. In general, it was pretty cool to be back there, using the herbarium like a regular old scientist.

Funny note: The herbarium is in the huge Valley Life Sciences building, across the atrium from the Museum of Paleontology. I was told that it was across from the T-Rex, which was true and kind of bizarre.

Researchin' the day away

I finally got to visit one of the sites for my study, the Alkali Grassland Preserve in Woodland, CA (ironic town name, as you can see). Here are some pictures that I took myself of Cordylanthus palmatus. This time I don't have to worry about getting permission to post the pics.







We went early in the morning (the PhD student, Tracy, and I) in order to beat the heat and the blackflies. We checked on some experiments that Tracy is working on and I wandered around, going "what's this?" "what's this?" every five minutes. Some of the plants out there I recognized, especially Salicornia, pickleweed. I love this plant, it looks like seaweed growing on land, or knobby little gnome fingers.



We also took some samples of three different Atriplex species, hoping that one of them would be the ever elusive Atriplex joaquiniana, one of the rare plants that I'm supposed to include in the second half of my study. One of the plants we collected was kind of weedy in the site, and I had already shown it to my professor who said it wasn't A. joaquiniana, but we took it anyway. I brought the three plants to the herbarium at Davis and the curator there, Ellen, wonderfully offered to press them and show them to the California annual Atriplex guy, Robert Preston. I just went by there today to see what he had to say, and there are not one, but TWO RARE ATRIPLEX on my site!!! This is big people. Very exciting. Apparently the one that is weedy actually is A. joaquiniana, and a smaller one I collected is A. depressa. Wahoo! This means that my master's research will not be on only one plant, but at least two, if not three. I am sighing with relief.



Things are coming along with my research otherwise as well. Of course there is the requisite stress in between, but things are rolling now, so as long as I continue to make myself massive to-do lists, things will be aaaaaaall right.

The Sierra Nevadas - Days 2 & 3

Day 2: Upper montane and subalpine zone of the western Sierra Nevadas

We drove up the western side of the Sierras and stopped several times along the way to see how the vegetation types change with elevation. We drove up through the white fir and red fir dominated forests, all the way up to the subalpine zone at 8,000 feet. It was chilly up there, and the snowballs were flying. The temperatures in Davis have been in the 80s and 90s for the past month so everyone was really excited to see the snow.



The trees in the subalpine zone are really stressed because of high winds and cold temperatures. In the winter, the wind picks up ice from the snow and blows it against the trees, scouring off the branches from the windward side of the trees. The trees are really funny looking because it looks like they only grow branches on one side.



There are a lot of really low-lying plants up there too, and their flowers are disproportionately large. They're called cushion plants because they resemble little pin cushions. This growth form keeps them insulated under the snow in the winter, and keeps them from drying out and getting sunburned from the intense sun.



Juniper trees grow in the subalpine zone, and their bark is beautiful and peeling.





We camped for the night at Grover Hot Springs State Park on the eastern side of the Sierras. There's a pool there that's heated by the hot springs, but you had to pay $5 to get in and wait in line. Plus, it's just a regular pool, so I decided to pass and I played dominoes instead.



Day 3: Eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas

The eastern side of the Sierras is drier than the western side because of the rain shadow created by the mountains. As clouds move east across CA from the ocean, they move up and over the mountains. The atmosphere thins as the clouds move up in elevation, and the water is squeezed out of the clouds to fall on the western slope. As the clouds descend on the eastern side of the mountains, they move down in elevation and expand, sucking up any available moisture. So the western side of the Sierras is a lot wetter than the eastern side. I think that's a really cool phenomenon, but then again, I'm a science nerd.



We also saw an aspen stand on the eastern side of the mountains.





We travel everywhere in these school vans and it cracks me up. People must think that we're a caravan of government vehicles.



So that was the last of the field trips. It was a crazy quarter, but there's only one more week left!

The Sierra Nevadas - Day 1

On May 25-27 I went on my last field trip of the quarter, to the Sierra Nevada Mountain ranges that border California on the eastern side. We basically drove a transect up and over the mountain range from the mixed conifer forest on the western side, up higher and higher in elevation to the alpine environment, and over to the drier eastern side of the mountain range, just south of Lake Tahoe. It was breathtaking.

Day 1: Calaveras Big Trees State Park



We spent the first day of the trip driving east through the Great Central Valley, through the oak woodland and foothills, and up to the lower montane forest zone of the Sierra Nevadas. We went on a hike to see the big trees (Sequioadendron giganteum) in Calaveras Big Trees State Park! We camped in the park for the night, which was great fun. We made pasta and salad for dinner, and the whole class gathered around the campfire afterward and told stories. It started with my professor telling Mark Twain's "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and then continued with other people telling stories and jokes, playing songs on the guitar, and singing. It was wonderfully kumbaya.



The open, park-like understory of the mixed conifer forest.




The cool "jigsaw" bark of the Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa)


Big trees!




Our campsite, that's my tent on the right, halfway out of the picture.


Dinner and kumbaya