Garden Challenges

Seeds and Bounty

Bright purple Easter Egg radishes, pink and white striped Chioggia beets, red-freckled Forellenschuss lettuce...it’s midsummer and the garden is bursting! As the Farm intern for the garden in the backyard of Farm House this summer, I have been sowing and weeding and watering and weeding and tending and weeding and am now beginning to collect bountiful harvests.

(**Additional posts will be added on as we receive each update.)

Garden Challenges added

Other Farms added 8/21

The four most important things I have learned... added 8/21

Successful Garden Tours added 8/21

Greetings from the Great Bear Rainforest! I'm spending my summer in the Koeye (pronounced "kway") watershed on the mid-coast of British Columbia. The Koeye is of great cultural and ecological importance to the Heiltsuk First Nation, for whom this area has been traditional grounds for thousands of years.

See Additional post  08/10/08

After a two and a half days driving from Madison, WI to Gallup, NM, I’m finally here, still adjusting to the altitude, and just completed my first week interning with the Navajo Department of Justice in Window Rock, AZ (a 30 minute drive from Gallup). I’m working with attorney Dave Taylor on a uranium contamination lawsuit. I’m spending my summer indexing 6 boxes of documents sent to Mr. Taylor by the U.S. Department of Energy.

(**Additional posts will be added on as we receive each update.)

Week 5 & 6 added

Those dedicated SOPEers are at it again. After convincing the dining hall to use silverware made of corn, revitalizing the green roof, and founding the Sustainability Revolving Fund, SOPE has installed a new eco-friendly project on campus.

Click here to find out what it is.

As of today, Carleton's new rideshare website is up and running! This website, created by Amy Wilson '08 for her ENTS capstone, features an interactive map that allows you to see who, in the Carleton community, lives near your home address, what your transportation options are in traveling to and from campus, and what the environmental impacts of commuting to Carleton are. This site is a fantastic resource for travel and for the study of transportation at Carleton and beyond. Faculty and staff can log in to see whether there are potential rideshare partners who live near them and students can use the site to see whether they can share rides at the beginning and end of breaks with other students. Check out the new site and make use of it in planning your vehicle travel to and from campus!

 The site: https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/rideshare/

The Carleton administration and the Carleton Student Association (CSA) Senate usually follow the philosophy that Carleton students vote with their feet when it comes to environmental activism and education on the campus. Record turnout at environmental events, concerns about the environmental effects of Carleton’s food and appliance purchasing, and continued interest in the College’s Environment & Technology Studies program are all indicative that concern for the environment is becoming an entrenched Carleton value. However, last week students got the opportunity to actually vote for more environmental programming—and the results were astonishing.

When asked in a recent Senate election whether they would support the allocation of a portion of the Student Activity Fee to a “Green Fund,” an unprecedented 82.3% of those who voted said “yes.” This is one of the highest positive proportion of responses in the history of student referenda at Carleton. The Green Fund will be utilized by students and their organizations to fund environmentally-sustainable decisions and initiatives, and will be debuting on campus next fall, so get excited!

As spring begins to turn to summer, a whole new world is blooming in the arb. This is especially evident throughout the prairies as wildflowers and grasses start to bloom. But there is strong competition amongst the many different species of flowers and grasses for space, and many seeds need some help in order to germinate.

There is a surprising animal which provides the opportunity for many of these plants to thrive in such a crowded environment. That animal is the Plains Pocket Gopher, Geomys bursarius. An unsightly tan-colored gopher reaching up to 13 inches in length, it has short legs with huge feet and long teeth made for digging. Rarely seen above ground, it is identified by the mounds it leaves when it burrows. These mounds are about a foot in diameter and have a distinct shape resembling a horseshoe and can be found throughout the prairies in the arb.

As gasoline approaches a national average of $4.00 per gallon, very few people, even among the most ardent environmentalists, are completely welcoming and celebrating high gas prices. After all, increases in fuel costs disproportionately affect lower income individuals, many of whom spend a higher percentage of their income on energy sources like electricity and gasoline. Additionally, most earth-minded individuals are just as subject to a faltering economy as anyone else. Those things being said, though, there is a bright spot in the rise at the pumps—Americans are reducing the amount that they drive.

The Arb just had a thoroughly action-packed week.  Last Friday, your arb naturalists spotted a rare wood turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) on the banks of the Cannon.  The first sightings of these turtles occurred in the late nineties, with just six recorded between 1996 and 1999.  We had seen none since, until this one, a young, approximately eight-year-old female. If unfamiliar with these elusive beasts, you can begin picturing them from their name, for they look like carved wood, and inhabit woods along rivers.  Wood turtles can solve mazes as well as rats, and this remarkable intelligence has made them desirable in experiments and as pets.  The combination of this use and habitat degradation has made wood turtles a threatened species in Minnesota.  Their continued presence in the Arb bodes well for the Arb’s success as an ecological restoration project. 

This week, senior concentrators in Environmental and Technology Studies (ENTS) will present their capstone projects. As always, the capstone projects this year vary greatly in topic, reflecting the rich diversity of academic disciplines with which the ENTS program is engaged. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Here is the schedule:

ENTS Capstone Symposium
May 22-23, 4:30-6:15
Willis Hall 205

Thursday, May 22

4:30 "In Search of Darwin," Amanda Smith
4:50 "Examining How We Think About Technology," John Heydinger
5:10 "Commuting to Carleton: The Present, the Possible, and the Impacts," Amy Wilson
5:30 "Incorporating Stakeholders into Ecosystem Service Conservation," Bessie Schwarz

Friday, May 23

4:30 "Using GIS Technology to Resolve Land Use Conflict:
A Case Study of Development in the Moosehead Lake Region," Emma Glidden-Lyon
4:50 "The Ames Mill Today: Policy Suggestions for the Northfield City Council," Shannon Carcelli
5:10 "Jatropha Production in Koulikoro, Mali: A Proposed Study of
a Weed and its Agricultural, Economic, and Energy Benefits," Tim Singer
5:30 "Discovering Trash," Dylan Welch
5:50 "Uganda: An Exploration of Urban Agriculture," Natalie Coleman

This past Saturday, Irwin Hall at St. Olaf was full of St. Olaf students and faculty along with a handful of Carleton students eagerly waiting to hear what Amy Klobuchar had to say on climate change. She began by showing some fun video clips about her visit to Greenland last summer in which, decked out in rain gear, she floats in fishing boats around icebergs. As the video is geared towards kids, Klobuchar frequently uses it when she speaks at schools about climate change.

Though Greenland’s melting ice sheets may not seem directly linked to the lives of Minnesotans, Klobuchar made the issue if rising global temperature hit home by drawing a connection with the decreasing water levels that we are currently experiencing in the Great Lakes. She explained that barge traffic is an essential part of the economy and supplies many jobs in northern Minnesota. The dropping water level of Lake Superior has already done damage to the barge traffic industry.

When Klobuchar approached the issue of what is being done to address such problems, she made it clear that leadership is coming from individual states, not Washington. It was evident that she feels that Minnesota is doing its part to be a leader on climate change. She was beaming as she referenced Minnesota’s renewable energy standard which commits the state to using 25% renewables by the year 2025.