SPRING AHEAD: An Outdoor Report

It's Spring again on the Oxbow campus, so we thought this week we'd give you a taste of what's been happening outside the studio walls...

A couple weeks ago, 15 strapping young Oxbow students shoveled ten yards of compost onto the school's biggest garden. In case you're new to the world of compost, that's about 10,000 pounds of dirt--no small feat. The plot, sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Annex," "The Colony," or "The Back 40," is a piece of land owned by our neighbor a little bit down Third Street. We've been very lucky to be able to use this land, as it's more than doubled our campus growing space. Our neighbor's mother grew up there, and tells vivid stories of how her mother (an  Italian immigrant) cultivated enough food on the plot to feed their family of 10. When we first started gardening there, the family gave us a small bag of magic beans--magic because they are a true heirloom, grown and saved from beans our neighbor's grandmother carried with her from Italy (in the 1920's? 1930's?). We've been having some trouble getting the garden up and running over the last couple years, mostly because the soil needs a lot of work. So we've been chipping away, one row at a time, applying compost and amendments in too-small doses and seeing too-small yields. Gone are those days! We are about to see this garden take off...





Our giant load of organic compost was generously donated by the Napa Recycling and Waste Services, who make compost from Napa household food waste, and it's going to make things so much better for our garden. Next week we'll turn the compost in, shape the rows, and start seedlings in the greenhouse. With a space this big producing food at it's full potential, we'll be able to make a significantly larger contribution to the Oxbow dining program. And of course we plan to plant a whole row of the magic family heirloom beans. 

The rest of the Oxbow gardens are already in full Spring swing, with veggies planted by OS29 ready for harvest. Check out this prize-winning cauliflower:

In other exciting outdoor news, our new batch of Ox-Chix have started laying. With the days getting longer and our girls pigging out on kitchen scraps and bugs, we'll soon be getting about two dozen eggs a day. Our flock is quite stylish, with six different breeds laying eggs in a lovely range of colors: greens, blues, rusty browns, even ecru. We had to build an addition to the "coop condo" to accommodate the busy layers!

Oxbow students rotate through Ox-Chix duty on a weekly basis, and are responsible for making sure that the chix have food and water. The kids on chix duty also bring the hens special scraps from the kitchen, and collect the eggs, which go directly to the dining hall and are served for breakfast the very next day. Aren't these just the prettiest eggs you've ever seen?







And finally, last Friday we took a Spring walkabout on the Marin coast. It was a spectacularly warm, clear day, and a great time was had by all. What a treat to spend the day off campus, outdoors, TOGETHER. Happy Spring!