A Week of Ideas - by Kainui Rapaport - Garden Intern

This week was about ideas. I started the week as a lead cook, where with Amelia I made a breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, veggie sausages, tofu scramble and more. I am excited to use more foods in the garden but it is hard to use it for breakfast food. I look forward to more fruits in our breakfast.

Food forest at my school.

We took a tour in Seattle of the Beacon Food Forest to get more ideas and implement some of them into our own. They had a several acre plot that was well designed with a beautifully crafted common space. It must use thousands of volunteers to maintain this garden without any weeds. It looked like they used strawberries as a cover crop. 

Farmer's Market

On Friday I worked several hours at the Farmer's market and brought back some local organic food from Bautista Farms in Yakima.

Beacon Hill Food Forest

We are implementing more permaculture design curriculum in our garden work. On Saturday Katie gave the piglets a tour of the food forest at Songaia. I was surprised to see how much fruit it is producing. For the first time, I saw ladybugs mating.  Katie is a fountain of knowledge, and I appreciate her way of working the land with little impact. 

We then saw a Seattle Earthship, a housing structure made of recycled materials like tires and dirt. It was mainly used as a teaching resource than a habitable resource. 

Mt. Rainier

We moved the goats again to remove blackberries and it seems like we will be doing this all over the property. I just finished school and on my last day, I went hiking on Mt. Rainier for the first time with Steven.