July 12, 2007

Back from the Taste

Hello and welcome back to the internship blog. The Taste of Chicago is finally over and for those of you who had a chance to make it down to the festival; I hope you had a blast. Also, thank you to those of you who were able to stop by and see the University of Illinois Extension's display. It was a real success thanks to our Master gardeners and all their hard work.

One great thing that the Extension benefits from the Taste is the new things that we get to add to our program. For example, the city gave us rain garden plants, rain barrels, earth boxes, compost bins, and best of all a green roof display. All of which we can use on our grounds to aid in educating the community on various "going green" projects and ideas.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working on mulching the area to prevent weeds from coming up and this was a very labor intense project. We finally finished and the area looks great. The plants look more vibrant and weed control has been effective.

This past week's experience with the children from Mt. Greenwood Park's Special Recreation program was a blast. We worked with garden crafts. The kids decorated visors to protect them from the sun when working in the garden. In addition to crafts, we had them plant several earth boxes so that they can observe plants as they develop over the next few weeks.

Posted by Ron Wolford at 11:48 PM |