A New Kind of Tea

Like any good southerner, I would enjoy a nice cold glass of sweet tea after a morning of installing garden beds in the hot sun. On cold winter afternoons I love to curl up with a hot mug of peppermint tea. When I'm feeling a little crazy I might even go for some chai.

Well, today Anne and I had an adventure with a new kind of tea. Loose leaf? Maybe, but it's made with what used to be leaves rather than what is still in its leaf-like state today. Where tea leaves are usually dried, our experimental leaves were, well, decomposed. What exactly were we doing? We were exploring the art of brewing tea for our plant friends.

Being inclined to have my tea sweetened with honey rather than rice hulls, I think I will leave it to the vegetables to do a taste test.

Here's how we made compost tea:






Step One: Get compost














Step Two: Find cheesecloth (at Market Basket it is located above the hot dogs in the refrigerator section), soybean meal (in lieu of aloe or yuca extract), and fish emulsion (a brown, lumpy, fishy smelling liquid fertilizer that shows up at GCG more often than you would wish for)







Step Three: Fill a bucket with water and place an air pump in the bottom to ensure good percolation
















Step four: Suspend a cheesecloth teabag filled with compost into bucket with water, soybean meal, fish emulsion, pump, and sit back and enjoy your handiwork. (As you can see, Anne knows this tea is where it's at!)

An Essay from a Summer Intern

Working at Green City growers will be unforgettable for me even when I go back to Korea.

Actually, when I decided to work here, I didn’t know exactly how this company would function to grow lots of vegetables and what I should do to make Green City Growers flourish. However, as I worked here longer, I learned lots of precious things that I was not interested in before.

Firstly, while I worked at G.C.G, I learned how to make lines of irrigation which can support plants firmly. It was a new experience for me to make these. When I accidentally found the lines of irrigation I had made in the garden outside, it made me feel worthwhile. Also, I used to sort seeds according to alphabetical order.

By sorting, I became familiar with what kinds of seeds can be helpful for people who want to eat vegetables such as tomatoes, broccoli, kale, spinach, basil and something like that.

And it was also an interesting experience for me to transplant plants to grow much bigger and healthier. After I learned how to transplant plants well, I recognized there are lots of ways to promote the growth of plants.

Even though I had never been interested in organic vegetables, now I think that I should protect plants just like humans and each creature.

What I want to thank Jessie and Anne for is that they not only gave me opportunities to get exciting experience but they gave me a realistic environment where I could speak and practice speaking English by working with other interns who are native speakers.

Even though I can’t speak English very well, they helped me achieve my goal to speak English better.

Although I go back to my country, I will not forget and I will miss Green City Growers’ staff.

I hope Green City Growers can flourish more and more.

-Nyeong Soo Jung, a summer intern

Nyeon Soo is a student in the Kaplan English as a second language program. She interned at Green City Growers this summer in order to improve her English.

In the Garden

Here are some photos of the things we saw in the gardens last week:






We continued to harvest chard with brightly colored stalks in reds and yellows.















The carrots are getting so big!















Tomatoes are starting to grow larger on the vines, still mostly green. We harvested some Heirloom Black Prince tomatoes at a house in JP! Why are these particular tomatoes so ahead of the game? Perhaps the saxophone player who lives next door is working wonders with his musical interludes. Do tomatoes like jazz?











We also saw some adorable baby cucumbers, covered in a prickly outer layer, flowers still clinging on.