Month: July 2018

Forecast: Still some green, hopefully less

Experts are predicting that the harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie this summer will be smaller than last year’s, which was the third-largest ever recorded, but will be larger than the mild bloom in 2016. The bloom is expected to measure 6 on the severity index, but could range between 5 and 7.5, according to a forecast issued yesterday by a team of scientists including from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Ohio State’s Ohio Sea Grant program.

Continue reading →

Got muck? Ohio does. Here’s what it’s like

Aptly named Celeryville, located near Willard in Huron County, is the home of CFAES’s Muck Crops Agricultural Research Station. The black fertile soil there was left after a group of Dutch immigrants, working with a local entrepreneur, drained what was then called the Willard Marsh. It happened in the late 1800s.

Today, the area’s farms serve as Ohio’s salad bowl, growing lush lettuce and more quickly and well. The station, for its part, conducts research to help the farms do that even better. But the work and soil have their challenges. Read more on our CFAES Stories website. (Photo: Station manager Bob Filbrun, Ken Chamberlain, CFAES.)

Growing a ‘flourishing neighborhood resource’

On Saturday, July 14, Magic House Farm, which spans a half acre of formerly vacant lots in Columbus’s Franklinton neighborhood, will host the next stop in the Columbus Urban Farm Tour Series. You’re invited, the tour flier says, to see “how this urban oasis in a distressed neighborhood has grown from a small one-man operation to a flourishing and necessary neighborhood resource.” Free admission. Read more. See the series schedule.

How you can help slow down waterhemp

An agricultural weed called waterhemp is “spreading at alarming rates” in western Ohio, says Jeff Stachler, an educator with CFAES’s OSU Extension outreach arm. On July 25, he’ll share ways to slow down or stop that spread at Manure Science Review. One of the event’s co-hosts is CFAES.

Waterhemp, a cousin of Palmer amaranth, has become increasingly resistant to weed-killing herbicides.

How your pond can produce more fish

The Intensifying Pond Production of Fish workshop, its website says, will help pond fish producers “to intensify their operation and grow more pounds of fish per acre of water.” It’s July 14 in Marysville in central Ohio, in part at the Millcreek Perch Farm. CFAES’s Aquaculture Boot Camp is a co-host.

Find out more. (Photo: Yellow perch, Ken Chamberlain, CFAES.)

Thursday night at Stone Lab: SENR’s big 5-0; improving urban water quality

Tonight in Stone Lab’s guest lecture series, Jeff Sharp, director of CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources (SENR), will present “50 Years of Environmental and Natural Resource Education at The Ohio State University: Looking to the Next 50” (he speaks in the video above); and Rachel Gabor, assistant professor with SENR, will discuss “Watersheds and Sewersheds: Identifying Controls on Water Quality in Urban Environments.” Admission is free and open to the public. Find out more.

Stone Lab, part of CFAES, is located at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie.

SENR is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.