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| Image: Transplanting a squash into its new row. |
This week, I worked on a variety of projects. I worked making newsletters and flyers but also got out of the office and did hands-on work multiple times this week. So far, I have worked on many resources for the master gardeners program. This week I formatted the June newsletter. This meant taking the articles and arranging them on the template in a way that looked good, adding pictures, and writing captions that fit the article. I also wrote an article for the newsletter about Maryland's lawn fertilizer law.
On Wednesday, Emily and I went to the Delmarva Chicken Association's booster barbeque. We worked at a table giving out information about Extension's farm stress management program. This program gives farmers resources to deal with some of the most common farm stressors and more general stress management tactics. This was an excellent opportunity to learn more about chicken farming, a concentration in ag that I know little about. I also got to use this as a chance to network. I got to meet people from other extension offices as well as many farmers and people in the community. The highlight of this night was making an origami chicken with Maryland's Secretary of Agriculture.
On Thursday, Emily and I went to the Lower Eastern Shore Research and Education Center (LESREC) to check on how the squash has come up for the study we are working on. We needed four plots with four full rows each. Not all the squash had come up, so we had to transplant some of the squash so all the plots we needed were full. Working with vegetables is new for me, so it has been a cool experience to learn how to handle them and how we will take care of them.
My experiences in the ag community will help me with my internship. I have grown up attending many of the same types of events I am working at. This experience has given me an outside perspective on the most effective way to communicate. One example of this is the Delmarva Chicken Association Barbecue. I had gone to many of these family-centered events and used my knowledge of how I used to act to entertain the kids with free goodies to give me time to provide the information to the adults before the kids got bored.
My goal for this internship is to learn as much as possible. My experiences with ag have been mostly focused on grain farming. I am taking this opportunity to gain knowledge in fields I don't know much about. So far I have learned a lot about gardening and growing fruits and vegetables. Before starting this internship I knew almost nothing and now see it is much more difficult than I thought. This more comprehensive view of agriculture will help me figure out what I want to focus on with my career in food science.
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| The view from our table at the Delmarva Chicken Association Barbeque. |
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