Week Five with Extension by Alison Layton

Me with some of the kids from Almost Adulting 101 camp

This week I was able to try a lot of new things. First, on Tuesday, I attended a master gardeners meeting at the Cambridge community garden. I got to see what a regular meeting looks like and what the master gardeners do. This was also an opportunity to see a community garden in my community that I didn’t know about. I could see how it was set up and people from the community enjoying their space to grow plants they wouldn’t usually have the space for. Then we went out to the Lower Eastern Shore Research and Education Center (LESREC) and started spraying the squash for the study on organic pesticides. I learned how to use the backpack sprayer and sprayed water on some of the squash. I spent the rest of the day weeding the field.

Then, on Wednesday, I helped 4-H with their Almost Adulting 101 camp. I helped set up and supervised the kids as they were taught many life skills, such as dental health, cooking, nutrition, and how to dress for an interview. This was fun because I’ve never worked with kids before, and being able to help the kids learn things was a rewarding experience. After that, we went to the Wye research center to tour and learn about the studies they are doing there with weeds. 

Me filling cans with strawberry jam.

Thursday was the most exciting day of the week because Emily and I took a canning class. As a food science major, there’s not much in this internship that directly correlates to my major, so it was fascinating to talk about food science with someone and learn a lot about food preservation. We did two types of canning. We used pressure canning to can tomatoes, and then we used water bath canning to can the strawberry jam that we made. This class was exciting because not only did we learn how to can, but we learned so much of the science behind it, which I thought was cool to learn about.

On Friday, we went to LESREC and did our first round of bug counts. A few days after we spray, we have to count how many bugs are on each plant to see how effective each method is. I learned what bugs we are looking for and how to identify them. Then Emily and I went through and counted them. It was also interesting because not only did I learn the bugs we are looking for, but I got to learn to identify other common bugs that we might find on the plant.

Squash bugs I found while doing bug counts.