The Adam Joseph Lewis Center

Maggie, Ren, and Kevin talk about the work they did at the AJLC this summer.

The Living Machine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmdsBlWwSTU

The AJLC Garden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwvAp8lTuDg&feature=channel&list=UL

AJLC Summer Intern Projects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DzWmakCnLE&feature=channel&list=UL 

The garden is getting a fall makeover! Students have been working out in the garden all afternoon tilling our garden beds and getting ready to plant fall crops. We've already planted beets, spinach, lettuce, and garlic. Now it's time to set up our beds with cover crops and row covers for winter time. The chickens are loving the bugs and worms that are creeping through the tilled soil!

Our summer crops have been wildly productive up until now. We just harvested our last bunch of tomatoes, which we used in a tomato sauce at the Local Foods Fest.

Students are working in the garden and tabling at the Local Foods Fest until 4pm today! Go check it out and join the fun.

Gear up for the local foods fest at the AJLC this Saturday between 1:00-4:00. During this fest, AJLC staff will be working in the garden getting the last summer crops harvested, preserved and ready for over-wintering. We would love all the volunteer power we can muster on Saturday to keep our grounds healthy through winter. Learn some organic practices, a bit of permaculture, and some about preservation, or just ask us questions! Hope to see you there!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oclivingmachine/sets/72157631622729770/

We had a bountiful harvest of green beans, tomatoes, and squash today! We'll be donating a lot of our harvest to OCS. We're also still sun-drying a ton of the tomatoes, so that they preserve. Oh summertime, we wish you'd never end!

It's been a busy past to weeks in the garden here at the AJLC. Yesterday, we harvested 2 gallons (WOAH!) of tomatoes and donated them to OCS! We also have a ton of squash coming in, mainly summer butternut and pattypan varieties. Our grapes have also completely ripened. Yum! Since the summer is winding down, Kevin, Ren, and I have also alternated being off work. We've all taken some time off, but that means we have a lot of catch up work to do in the garden, wetland, orchard, and Living Machine!

We're not the only ones who have been busy. We've recently been letting the chickens out of their run and into the yard during the day, keeping them away from the garden so they don't munch on the crops. They've been happily scratching through our big compost pile, busily hunting for bugs. They've appreciated the time to stretch their legs, and we've appreciated the manure we get from them!

More to come later.

-Maggie

Our newly built solar food dehydrator is up and running! We have dehydrated cherry and pear tomatoes, dill, oregano, chives, mint, as well as seed pods (for saving seeds for next year's planting season) in the past week, and it has been wildly successful! Check it out:

Hi Followers!

So last week was pretty ridiculous just trying to catch up with all the growth these oddball sunny Oberlin days have brought (that in conjunction with the fact that Kevin was also gone last week).

First of all, all of the Queen Anne’s Lace is gone. I’m sure for all of the flower lovers, that sounds really horrific, but the truth is that all of the bushes of this barely edible ancient carrot were shading out all of our natives.

Secondly, we think we found out what little Cinnamon-Bun is sick with. After a little research, Maggie I believe that Cinnamon has sour crop. Sour crop is fairly common in chickens, especially when their gizzards are not being consistently replenished with rocks. The gizzard is responsible for grinding food and if the food is not ground, it will sit in the crop and ferment. When the crop ferments (sorry if this is a bit disgusting), it means that bacteria and/or fungus has begun growing within the chicken’s crop and in the process of breaking the food down, produce gas. All of this irritates the chicken causing the symptoms we have seen in Cinnamon. Some homeopathic stuff we have done thus far include adding some Apple Cider Vinegar to her water, adding a little olive oil to her meals and baking off some crushed egg shells to help replenish her gizzard. She was a little more chipper after the homeopathic approach, so we did decide to give her some antibiotics (dyamicin) this week. Hopefully we’ll be seeing some more improvement soon.

Thirdly, Maggie and I painted and built screen shelves for the dehydrator, which led to the week ending with dehydrating the dill forest! Does anyone need some dried dill? We also got oily exterior black paint all over ourselves. I think last time I talked about the dehydrator we had most of the frame constructed but it had no insulation, walls, doors, energy-absorptive screening, etc. For this, I have decided to share pictures! (More of which are available at flickr.com/oclivingmachine )

So those were are big projects for the last week, but in addition we harvested many, many little tomatoes, some squash, herbs, and figs (most of which we delivered to Oberlin Community Services), mowed the orchard, cleaned out some rock beds, de-algaed the pond, ‘pruned’ the living machine for a tour, fed our fish and indoor cycads, and more (believe it or not).

Also, thank you conference services, bon appetit, and summer research presenters for presenting in the AJLC Hallock Auditorium, which brought bagels, donuts, cookies, fruit, coffee, and tea into our atrium. It was appreciated!

Talk to you all soon!

Check out our photoblog of the work the Summer LM and Grounds interns are doing!

This past year, our Living Machine acquired a young fig tree, which was planted in the marsh gravel bed of the LM greenhouse. It has been through a couple journeys during its time in the greenhouse, namely one bout of a fungus infection and a transplanting to the middle of the greenhouse (before it was at the west side of the greenhouse right next to a pipe where running water flows into the gravel floor...not a good idea if the tree's roots were to start growing into the holes of the pipe). Since its transplantation, the fig tree has grown tall very quickly and has begun to fruit! Yesterday, we harvested a small batch of figs, and they were delicious!

Now, most people might think it's crazy for our staff to eat food grown in a wastewater treatment plant, but in this lay the beauty of the Living Machine system, where waste becomes food. The nutrients from the wastewater produced in the AJLC, which is conventionally thought of as unusable, is food for our fig tree, as well as for all of the bacteria and plant communities that inhabit the LM. You may think that it would be unsafe to eat food which came from a plant sitting next to wastewater, but the truth is our fig tree only makes contact with the wastewater through its roots, which filter the water before it reaches the rich fig fruits. In addition, we don't use any chemicals in the LM to treat the water from the AJLC. The majority of farms you would get figs from, however, may use pesticides and herbicides that end up on your fig and in your body. For this reason, our figs may be a much healthier fruit than one you would buy in a grocery store. But don't worry, just in case, we washed our figs before eating them!

I have been posting so much on this blog and realized I have never properly introduced myself! Hello, all. My name is Maggie, and I am currently a summer Living Machine and Grounds intern at the AJLC. I have been working with Ren and Kevin this summer to maintain the garden, orchard, Living Machine, wetland, and atrium plants, and it has been a wonderful learning experience. By this coming fall, I will be a third year at Oberlin College. I am an Environmental Studies major with particular interests in Biology and Geology.

Ever since my very first tour of Oberlin's campus as a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to work at the Living Machine. Seeing the AJLC was my favorite part of the tour, and I had heard about the building and Living Machine through my environmental science class in high school. Luckily, I scored a Living Machine Operator position in my second semester at Oberlin and have been here ever since.

It has been wonderful to get a chance to be working at the AJLC over the summer. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to be managing a garden on my own or work in an orchard. Before this summer, I had also had little experience caring for chickens and restoring a wetland. It has been a great learning experience for me to be able to delve into these subjects more fully!

I looked forward to posting more.

Our workdays here at the AJLC are full and busy every day. There's always something to do: clean the chicken coop, do a Living Machine water quality test, pick weeds around the wetland, and so forth. However, yesterday seemed to be one of the more eventful of the season.

We had a wonderful harvest from the garden yesterday. Tons of vegetables. Our tomato plants, which along with the squash dominate the majority of our garden beds, are mostly in full bloom, and tomato fruits are starting to ripen. We picked a bunch of cherry tomatoes yesterday and are working hard to string up and tomato plants that have started to get floppy from the weight of their fruits.

Along with the tomatoes, we had a huge harvest of summer squash, cucumber, nasturtium flowers, and pole beans.

Half of that harvest (the yellow squash, cucumber, and pole beans) went towards our third donation of the summer to Oberlin Community Services. As usual, we also donated a TON of collard greens and kale to them. They were so appreciative of our harvest. It was probably our biggest harvest in one day for the summer season so far. So exciting but a lot of hard work! We're going to have to keep harvesting tomatoes and squash throughout the next coming weeks.

Unfortunately, the biggest shock of the day, our lovely hen Cinnamon is sick! Her comb is very droopy, and she has been pretty lethargic and weak. We separated her from the rest of the chickens using our chicken tractor so that the other girls don't catch the cold. We are working on trying to find a way to cure her (using organic methods), but keep her in your thoughts! We hope she heals soon.

Finally, Ren spent the whole day clipping queen anne's lace flowers, a type of wild carrot, out of the wetland. We recently learned from a previous manager of the AJLC grounds that queen anne's lace is a non-native species, and it has begun to take over the wetland and pond and crowd out our native species. We have decided to cut out the flowers in order to promote the propagation of our native plants and increase wetland diversity. Ren has been working really hard for the past few days, and the change in wetland scenery is quite noticeable!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

In addition to these many projects, yesterday we had a long staff meeting, picked off some Japanese beetles from the garden plants and fed them to the chickens, identified squash and cucumber beetles in the garden (Oh no!), and did some water quality testing. What a full day. Hopefully you all can get a better understanding of what our jobs entail here this summer and how much work we do daily! It's great to know that the Living Machine and Grounds are getting to be so healthy from all our work!

We noted before that our corn has been attacked (mainly, eaten at the leaves) by Japanese beetles. It's been interesting keeping track of these beetles over the past week or so, because they have actually seemed to travel around our garden (and the AJLC as a whole) quite a bit and have diverted a bit of attention away from the corn. Unfortunately for us, we have seen them eating leaves on our apple trees in the orchard, our garden's zinnias, our grape vines, and now even on milkweed flowers in our wetland. Fortunately though, we are doing a great job of keeping their populations down! Kevin has been plucking these guys off our plants every morning and we've all been keeping an eye on them, checking throughout the landscape to see if they've popped up elsewhere. As of this morning, they re-found the corn again, and have started munching on our corn husks! No no!

A quick note: We've perfected the strategy for catching them! Fill a bucket with a bit of water, tap any plants with the beetles crawling on them over the bucket, and they all fall in (they're pretty dumb it seems and can't hold on well to the shaking plants)! The water ensures that they can't fly away! Kevin figured this out one morning after it rained.

...And then you know their final destination...as our boss Sean says, "dinosaur food" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/oclivingmachine/7489052310/in/set-72157630282332772)

-Maggie, OC '14

Hi there! My name is Erika and I'm another student working in the AJLC this summer. I hail from Knoxville, Tennessee––home of the Smoky Mountains, moonshine, and bluegrass. 

I'm doing a research project on an experimental restored wetland system out at the George Jones farm, just southeast of town. The wetlands were restored in 2001 and since then, they have served as a valuable educational and research tool for students and a beautiful home for wildlife! My project is focused on exploring the spatial pattern of plant species in the six different wetland cells and comparing the these patterns among the cells and over time. This means lots of time poring over aerial photographs taken of the wetland cells in a computer program called ArcGIS, which is a very useful tool for spatial analysis. 

In addition to computer work, I get to work in the field. I collect water samples from the wetlands and analyze them for nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus to increase our understanding of the wetlands' chemistry. This is important because one ecosystem function of wetlands is to purify incoming water (by removing nitrogen and phosphorus), so we want to see how well the wetlands are doing their job!

Some of my other tasks are working with probes in the wetland cells that monitor dissolved oxygen levels in the water, measuring the water level and extent (how far into the shallow end the water extends) of the cells, and trapping the occasional muskrat. Those buggers are a big problem in some restored wetlands because they burrow into the banks and can drain all the water out.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are some pictures of the wetlands! If you're ever interested in going out there and seeing them for yourself, shoot me an email and I'll give you directions!

Swamp-rose mallow (Malva moschata). A relative of marshmallow, the plant that was first used to make those things you toast over campfires.

Water-primrose (Ludwigia spp.) in very dry mud. This summer's drought has hit the wetlands hard.

Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense). Also called Cursed thistle and Lettuce from hell thistle among other things, and for good reason. This nasty plant has pricked and poked me more times than I can count...

Hi.

I’m posting a quick get-to-know-some-of-your-summer-interns post, and hopefully I won’t be the only intern or research student to post (because how awkward would that be?). My name is Ren (some call me Rennifer) and I refer to Oceanside, CA as my non-college home (if you know where Vista, CA is, give a coop knock of approval). It’s a bit of a change of pace to go from curling up for a good Harry Potter reading session at home to extricating dead trumpet creeper vines from the AJLC rock garden. I would say that the primary reason I was brought on board was to increase the educational value of a simple visit by generating informative signs about the technologies, philosophies, and care hidden beneath the sleek exterior of the Lewis Center, but I hope that I have been a positive force on the AJLC grounds as well. Thus far, I have trimmed up our living machine taros with a rusted machete, waded through our pond combing out both fresh and decomposing algae sheets, strung up our ridiculously fertile tomato plants, learned the what, why, and hows of ammonium testing, brushed up on the ol’ “TROUBLE” button on our fire alarm system, and removed countless flowers from our dill. All in all, I think I’ve learned a thing or two and am looking forward to seeing what the rest of this summer will hold...

Keep in touch!

P.S. my free time is generally absorbed by some terrible mandolin playing, a lot of vegan cooking, and knitting (as in some awesome knitted shorts!) Also, there's me, waiting for my ammonium to sample doing some dishes (we have some very explosive dishes... dangerous business)

Ren, one of our AJLC Living Machine and Grounds summer interns, is creating informational signs for parts of the AJLC building and landscape that are educational for building visitors and students. Here's a sneak peak at some of her beautiful posters She is creating signs about everything from the building's ground source heat pumps to the outdoor orchard. Check them out in the fall!