Tours and the Work Day

This weekend, 30 volunteers from All Souls Church and from the community descended upon Beardsley Community Farm to help us gear up for SPRING! Soon we will be planting our cold season crops and starting our peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes in the greenhouse. With the help of all our volunteers we got an amazing amount of work done this Saturday. We started to fence in our community garden plots, we weeded and pruned the Butterfly Garden, we weeded the strawberries and best of all we planted an orchard of 10 apple trees! This summer there will be berries and apples all around the park for the benefit of the people using the park.
Much Thanks to David Johnson, a member of All Souls, for these great photographs!

If you’re planting trees or thinking of planting trees, check this website out.
The Urban Forest Ecosystems Institute is a wonderful site. Enter in a tree name or any tree attribute to find the most suitable tree for your planting area.
For more general planting info go here or any equivalent planting site.
Or give us a call. (865) 546-8446

I also had the privilege of visiting the Eco-village at Berea College this weekend. The Eco-village is the college’s married student housing. It is a complex of fifty apartments arranged around a common yard space that is used for playing and gardening. All the apartments feature passive solar design, solar water heaters and low flow appliances. One sample apartment is entirely self sufficient. It has solar panels for its power, a passive solar water heater, roof windows to provide natural light during the day, rain water collection, thermal mass heating and cooling techniques, a wood burning stove, a composting toilet and an example wall of straw bale construction. It was fascinating to see that their rain water is collected off the roof and then stored in an underground cistern. The water from the cistern goes through a filter system and then is blasted by UV rays to kill any remaining bacteria. It is then usable as drinking water.

Probably the most impressive part of the tour was was the village “Eco-machine” that processes 10,000 gallons of sewage a day. The black and gray water from all fifty apartments is pumped to a large 10,000 gallon cistern. From this cistern the water is pumped into an anaerobic holding tank where it begins to break down. It is then pumped through a a series of 1500 to 2000 gallon tanks, all with different types of plants that filter the water. Once the water has been purified it goes into one more tank where it is not aerated and any particulate matter remaining in the water settles to the bottom of the tank. The clarified water is then pumped to a covered wetland near the example student house. It was amazing to see that so much sewage could be turned into clean water so quickly. If you would like to know more about it you can go to http://www.berea.edu/sens/ecovillage/.

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