CFAES’ Buckeye Yard & Garden onLine website recently told the story of a new project on Kelleys Island, which lies in western Lake Erie. Two CFAES educators, Thomas deHaas and Les Ober, were among the project’s collaborators, and in the end the team’s work all boiled down to a first: the first-ever run of Kelleys Island “Glacially Groovy” maple syrup. (Photo: A shoreline scene on Kelleys Island, Getty Images.)
“Clean water is the backbone to any great society. You’re not going to have healthy humans without it. You’re not going to have a healthy economy without it. You’re not going to have a healthy environment without it.”
NOAA will offer its annual harmful algal bloom forecast for western Lake Erie on Thursday, June 30. Stone Laboratory and Ohio Sea Grant, both part of CFAES, will host the live web event.
Registration is open for the Sustainable Agriculture Education Association’s 2022 national conference, set for July 21–24 at Ohio State and Central State, Ohio’s 1862 and 1890 land-grant institutions.
CFAES’ new Controlled Environment Agriculture Research Complex (CEARC) is 75% complete. It’s expected to open in fall. And while that’s good news for CFAES and the scientists who’ll be working there, it’s even better news for Ohio’s big-and-getting-bigger greenhouse industry.
If your soil is dodgy, if your space is tight, raised beds offer a great way to grow—for lettuce, peppers, and other vegetables, to be sure, and also for herbs and flowers. You can get how-to tips from CFAES experts on what to grow and how to do it in A Complete Approach to Raised Bed Gardening (28 pp., $7.50), available from OSU Extension Publications.
“Although we think of restoration as a science, it’s also about creativity. Prairie restoration begins with a vision. The dream of how the land might be healed, imagined in the mind of a steward or site manager.” So writes author Cindy Crosby in Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit.
On Tuesday, June 14, prairie restoration—and the use of creativity and imagination in the process—will be the focus of a field trip hosted by CFAES’ Environmental Professionals Network. Titled “If You Listen Carefully, It Sounds Like Love,” the event, its website says, will be “a celebration of beauty in the sounds of nine Ohio prairie seeds”—including wild bergamot, big bluestem, little bluestem, dogbane, and milkweed—“and the steps we can take as a bioregional community to help them thrive again.”
So, there’s a wildflower in Ohio named for its “resemblance to apair of upside-down pantaloons.” See it and more in “The Splendors of Spring—Part 2” (lots of great photos) by CFAES’ Carrie Brownon Buckeye Yard & Garden onLine. (Photo: Said pantaloon-resembling wildflower, Getty Images.)