These past couple of weeks at the Shedd have been super busy! On a department-wide basis, we have been have been in full Harvest-Mode. Filling crates full of turnips, shallots, and onions has been a weekly routine, and they now are overflowing in our storage room.
Beyond those, we have gotten cabbages as big as my head, bunches of lavender, buckets full of lettuce, and more bulbs of garlic than a person can even dream of using. At this point, my friends have expected a constant flow of produce delivered to them by yours truly. The most exciting thing from the last couple of weeks, however, was having the opportunity to dip my toes into beekeeping. Beekeeping has always interested me--When I was in high school, my dad found a hive for sale on Craigslist, and gave a go at keeping bees in our back yard. The bees stuck around for about two days, and then the hive collectively moved on to another location which neither my father nor I will ever know. This failed project left my dad sour on beekeeping, but since then I've always wondered exactly what it took to run a successful hive.
We had two contractual beekeepers come to the gardens to give us an "assessment" and primarily to expose us interns to the basics of beekeeping. They showed us how to remove the frames from one hive, and then let us try to do it mostly by ourselves with a second hive. Though at this point I have learned to be around bees and the hives, getting this up close and personal with them was pretty daunting. Despite my initial reservations, it ended up not being that scary and the bees did not attack me like I thought they would. And the best part is that after we collected all the frames, we got to extract the honey! This process was so much fun and SO delicious--even if it made everything in a 5-foot radius extremely sticky.
Working on projects with the other interns has been a lot of fun and very educational, but I've also finally had a chance to see some real progress in my personal garden beds. Things, like the kale and the tomatoes, which I planted and were certain that they would just continue to wither and die are now thriving. I've continued to plant more pepper plants in the beds, always keeping the quality and species consistent across both beds. With about a month left at the Shedd, I don't even know if I'll be able to harvest anything from my beds, but seeing this progress is still very satisfying and makes me proud of my work. Despite not being ready for harvest, I think I will start collecting samples soon to send to both an external lab and to the microbiome lab within the Shedd for nutritional analysis. This will give me some real data to play with, which I can in turn provide to the Shedd to help further their understanding of the nutritional breakdown and value of their feeding systems.
