Winter greens are popping up! Stop by for some mustard greens, spinach, mizuna, and radishes. And, as always, some wonderful herbs! Text or voicemail you comments to 9012099336

Bring on the Fall season!

Sweet summa' time is finally coming to a close and fall is right around the corner! There have been many changes to the garden including preparing for the fall garden crops and adding YOUR favorites like sweet potatoes, white potatoes, turnips, greens, radishes, beans, corn and some new herbs! We also have taken a stab at creating better signage and more information to help you in your harvesting endeavors!



With the fall season comes back to school events, football of course and lots of good veggies that YOU should come harvest. Come and try out our Black Beauty, Hansel & Grettle and Fairytale egg plants that make for great recipes to give your meals a little variety. Also, some of our Sweet Baby watermelons are ready for you to take them home. Make sure that you keep an eye out for a future email concerning our next volunteer day where we will be harvesting sweet potatoes which was similar to diggin' for gold last year. Not to mention, we will be serving drinks and giving out recipe books with our favorite recipes using vegetables straight from The Oasis garden. Stay tuned!


Please also check out our Tigurs facebook page where there are before and after pictures of our summer garden. Thanks again for all of your support and feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on either site. We love to hear them!

New photos by Charlie Crabtree

Thanks Charlie for taking care to give some photos. You're making the garden look great. The first two photos are of the garden behind Rose Theater and the second two are from the garden in front of Jones.

Tomatoes by boys and girls Hope Memphis

We have been hanging out this summer with some kids from Hope Memphis. They have been coming out to the garden to help us and discover what urban gardening is like. These boys and girls are kind and very hilarious. They are chosen students from Memphis City Schools who spend four hours every day at the university to experience campus and academic life. We get to spend an hour with them discussing gardening (we teach what much we're learning along the way). Come at eleven, everyone, and hang out with us and the kids of Hope Memphis.

On a ripening note, the tomatoes are "there" you just have to look for them. We want to keep as many green ones on the vine so that we can get 'em red. They are hard to find but if you push a leaf around you'll get them. "I" am making a salsa tonight with all the goodness from the garden. "I'll" put the recipe up.

We're are so serious when we say:
"Go to the garden! Pick some things! Make something! Love the goodness clean out of it! And then post it on here as a recipe!"
The best recipe wins our affection.

Happy Fourth of July (a couple days late)
Happy Late Summer

Happy Gardening!

Never quit your day job

The week-end came and went as parched as the week it wound-up: pockets of petrichor but nothing substantial. The good news is that our irrigation system, coupled with our master waterer, kept your vegetables and fruits thriving.

To Harvest: The corn is ready to be twisted off, the okra needs a home away from home, and the peppers are primed for some reader's digest(ion). If you have a sweet tooth after lunch at the UC or wherever, stop by the Garden behind Rose Theater and get stoked on red hot strawberries.

Busy weekend!

There's always a straggler that comes along, sees a beautiful and tasty pepper and wonders, "what's this?". He looks around and there is no one to hear him and respond. "What kind of strange and tasty thing is this?" No one to help. Well, admittedly, the garden workers can't spend all of every day in the garden (though occasionally they may try). However, the concrete signs that they made Friday can! It's been an adventure trying to get more permanent signage out in the garden, and we believe we've found the answer. These concrete signs will be sturdy enough to stand the outdoor climate and be reused every year so everyone will know what's what in the TIGUrS Garden.



But what's a garden without its harvesters? We need YOU! Our okra is growing like crazy and there's no one out there to pick it. The plants can be a little spiny, but the okra itself is perfect when it's about the size of your finger. Herbs are all the rage with such prolific plants like Basil, Oregano, Mint, Lemon Balm, etc. etc...

And don't forget those sweet banana peppers. They look a little something like this when ready to harvest: big, beautiful, and yellow (but not necessarily hanging out of this guy's mouth).



(Like pictures? More pictures on our Facebook page!)




TIGUrS. All organic. All free. All day. All night. Come check it out!

poplockin popcorn

So, here's how you know when to rip the ear off. (Van Gogh joke here "__________.") When the tassels brown, start checking the firmness of the ear by soft-squeezing it. If it's firm, pierce a kernel. If it runs milky from inside then you're ready to harvest. To harvest twist the ear from the main stalk at its base.

Here's our recipe:
Ingredients
One ear of Popcorn
One bag of Reese's Pieces or M n M's
Cooking Oil

Directions
1. Peel the ear and rub off all the kernels.
2. Coat the bottom of a pan with a thin layer of cooking oil.
3. Heat the oil 'till it gets a bit watery.
4. Coat the bottom of the pan with a thin layer of popcorn, place lid on popcorn, and turn stove up to med/high.
5. Shake the pan around, keeping it on burner, so not to burn kernels.
6. Let 'em pop.
7. Pop 'em into a bowl.
8. Pop some candy up in that bowl.
9. Pop in a film and chow down.

That's poplockin popcorn!

Oh My O-kra

It never fails that the garden gets greater every day. Thanks to the committee and volunteers for helping produce such a healthy harvest so far. Speaking of... there is more okra than we can shakes a stick at, so come take some for lunch. You'll get stuck, or hooked. Also, the fairy tale eggplants are like pastel rain droplets from the plants (I guess, "hence the name"). Come see. Thanks for visiting the garden and the blog.

The garden is looking beautiful today! (as usual :-) We watered our heaping compost piles in the hopes that the rubbish, water, and intense southern heat will work together to promote the growth of bacteria that will break down the rubbish to form some nice fertile soil for our crops in the future. Our new raspberry plants are looking rather sad, though. While watering the watermelon plants we added worm castings to the base of the raspberries to help 'em out. Hopefully we can bring them back to life for some wonderful raspberry deliciousness! Worm castings (worm poop, essentially) promotes what is known as Induced Systemic Resistance. The idea is that it helps out the plants' natural bacteria to help it fight off disease and unwanted pests while providing them with nutrients. Worms are so little, but they do so much! Definitely worth googling if you have the time.

P.S.- I spied some pink tomatoes getting big on our vertical-twine-staking demonstration bed. They aren't red (or pink, I guess..) yet, but it won't be long. Come visit!

Monday night appetizers

Monday. Next week there will be leeks, black beauty, eggplants, tomatillos and jalapenos ready for harvest along with the cucumbers and herbs. Come get some basil, oregano, or parsley to ornament your meals. Also, the bachelor button flowers are edible. We'll try to find a recipe and post it soon. Thanks for visiting the garden and the blog. Here's an original TIGUrS recipe to spice up your dining life as a little "thank you".

Ingredients:
TIGUrS sweet peppers
Tasty bacon
Honey (you can get local honey from schnucks or kroger.
Cream cheese
Water chestnuts

1. Wrap the peppers in the bacon, drizzle with honey and grill or pan fry them.
2. Slice chestnuts and toss the on grill or pan for two minutes a side.
3. When bacon is fully cooked, chop off tip of pepper and put some cream cheese in the pepper.
4. Toothpick a chestnut to the pepper.
5. Love it!

If you change it let us know how it goes. They are amazing.

Terra Firma Trigonometry

So many students and neighbors have been visiting the garden this week. Thanks for that! The first week of summer classes was a blast. This week the favorite foods were sugar snap peas, Chinese cucs, and Purple Haze carrots. Two shade structures were made out of discounted fabrics (we're excited about those). Right angles were the right angle for designing these triangular towers. We look forward to making more and adding other contributions to help our university get pretty and healthy. The physical plant has done a great job of keeping the landscape pristine (especially by the garden) and the staff are always fun to chat with between classes. Keep an eye out for tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and blueberries. Also, don't forget the Wilder Tower Island and the Jones Building Garden (under the Ginkgo). Lunch breaks in a garden are always chill. Best to you students. See ya.

Hot-burning burmuda and dragonflies

The Tigurs committee has decided that the best option to destroy the weeds that are creeping into the gareden paths is to burn the Burmuda grass with a blow torch. We were skeptical at first that this would not be an efficient method, but it turns out that burning, though back bending and a little toasty, is the quickest way to kill the weeds. The job went much faster today (thanks to some great training), but it's going to have to be a weekly job.
New Summer squash and Spaghetti squash seeds have been planted to replace the squash plants that soon will no longer be harvestable. They should be popping up within the next couple of days, so look for the little seedlings as well as all of the dragonflies that are swarming throughout the garden.

Your Two Cents

yes, we've begun taking donations. Tell us what you know or want to know.

6/9/10

watered this morning: the corn is sky-rocketing, the okra and peppers are so prolific and the zinnias are Everywhere! Yesterday a group of Memphis City School students toured the garden. The TigUrs are looking forward to a summer with the students, studying urban gardening for eight weeks on campus. They are an amazing group: so smart (and hilarious). And it was a real pleasure to meet their leaders. Joe is a Knicks fan and deeply intelligent. Gardening and sustainability are about time spent--invest and reap rewards. But we have to know and appreciate the "how" of this whole thing. We are all learning. This summer has definitely been worth the wait.