Siena week 7

With the arrival of week 7 we are entering the 2nd week of our program/camp. The teens in my focus group seem to be doing well. They are learning quite a bit about the garden and the history of the site. Elijah still has trouble keeping his pants up but Fatmata is no trouble and is actually quite enjoyable to work with. On Monday(I thinnk) I went to the main branch of the Albany public library and met with Tony Opalka, the Albany city historian. He agreed to come speak to the teens about the history of Arbor Hill the following week. Arbor Hill is the name of the neighborhood that I am working in. But this week we had a different Tony come speak. On Wednesday, Tony Rivera came to speak to the teens. He works in the ACE office (Siena's CCE) and had a difficult past so we thought it would be cool for the teens to hear his success story and see that your past doesn't have to affect your future. Our teens will be giving garden tours as their part of the open house at the end of the camp and their knowledge of the gardens and the plants in them is growing rapidly. We have been using games to help them learn how to identify plants and remember facts about them. Some games have gone better than others. They said the scavenger hunt was cruel torture, which is just ridiculous. The garden stand went well this week. Word got out to people outside the neighborhood about what we were doing so we actually had some sales this week. We made about $30ish in produce sales. This week is also made more interesting by the presence of another camp on our properties. The Hartgen Archaeological group is holding their archaeology summer camp at our site. So there are like 40 kids digging very precise, measured square holes and it seems like they might be uncovering some pretty cool stuff. Also their fearless leader bought some stuff from the garden. But that sale was the source of our first (and last) real blunder in selling veggies. The man ordered thyme and we gave him Pistou Basil instead because it was labeled as thyme in a different part of the garden and we were gardening newbies. The next day (Thursday) one of our master gardeners came to work with us and told us that is was in fact basil and not thyme. She also showed us how to make bouquets of flowers from the garden and we will be selling those in addition to the produce. So yay more money I guess. We have a few extra vases lying around so we are using those. That first day we made bouquets one of the other focus group leaders bought one of our teens first attempts for his wife so that was neat. Hopefully they will be a popular item with the general public as well. On Friday the Hartgen people were back so we gave their leader guy his correct order of herbs free of charge. Their camp was also having an open house that day so we made some good sales. We were able to add green beans to our list of veggies to sell and people liked them a lot. Overall it was quite the productive week.

Peace out.