Trae's Spider and Project Noah

Well I don't know about everyone else but I have been swamped and finding the time to garden has been hard enough let alone trying to find time to blog about gardening. However, I did find myself in the garden with my housemates the other day and we were lucky enough to be there when Trae Booker was there as well.  Trae is our community liaison and she is always just so much fun to be around - not to mention the great gardening advice that she always has.  Well any way Trae says "you have to see this spider in my garden" and she took us over and pointed out this huge spider.  None of us knew what it was so I volunteered to post a photo of the spider on Project Noah.  Project Noah is a website tied to a mobile app where you can post photos of wildlife and plants.  If you can't ID something you can indicate this and the community will help you.

Project Noah is an awesome online field guide that was started by NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.  According to their about page:

"It all started off as an experiment to see if we could build a fun, location-based mobile application to encourage people to reconnect with nature and document local wildlife. We wanted to harness the power and popularity of new smart phones to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity... Our ultimate goal is to build the go-to platform for documenting all the world's organisms and through doing this we hope to develop an effective way to measure Mother Nature's pulse. By encouraging the mobile masses to document their encounters with nature, we hope to build a powerful force for data collection and an important educational tool for wildlife awareness and preservation. We hope you'll support us on this mission by joining Project Noah today."

After posting the spider on Project Noah I had an ID on it within a few hours.  GregMasteller IDed the spider as a Banded Garden Spider.  You can check out the posting on Project Noah here http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/7226745

Bexley Community Garden Video

I was playing with some digital storytelling tools for a workshop that I am giving next week and created this little video of the garden.

Worm Sightings

So you may have noticed our new barrel tumbler compost stations on the East and West of the garden. But we still have and apparently are still using the original 3 stage compost area on the NE side of the garden. With our recent expansion to the garden on the North end I am not sure what will happen to this area but I can tell you that there is some good activity in there. I am pretty new to gardening but I know that worms are a really good sign. So, I was delighted when another gardener and I took a bit of time to turn over the new weeds that were thrown into that compost area and found a ton of worms and other insects in there. Yay for healthy soil.

I also found this video on 3 bin composting that I thought was interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phj9LmqnwDY

Better Parking

Even though I live close enough to walk to the garden I do drive from time to time. On these occasions many times I end up parking in a muddy mess. Well no more! I arrived at the garden the other day to find these wonderful gravel parking areas right out front. Diane, our garden chair informed me that this was possible because of Mark Moore our City Services Liaison. Thanks Mark!

Correction! Apperently, Andy Bashore, head of our Service Department, is responsible for the gravel. So, big thanks Andy!