Description of my internship site, Turtle Lake Refuge:
“Our mission is to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands.
“We manifest this goal through promoting and practicing sustainable practices. Examples of our work include growing, harvesting and preparing local, wild and living food for the community, educating about the great values of the wild edible abundance available in our area, providing local micro-greens for the public schools, restaurants and stores, biking or driving on alternative fuel when possible, utilizing solar dehydrators, using a bicycle powered blender and wheatgrass juicer and educating about organic land stewardship practices.”
Turtle Lake has a booth at the farmer’s market, serves fresh local lunches daily, and comes to schools to educate about microgreens. They also have a catering service, provide organic lawn care, and have collaborated with the City of Durango’s Parks and Recreation department to make Brookside Park and Pioneer Park chemical-free. As you can see, Turtle Lake plays a large role in Durango’s community.
Description of my mentor, Katrina Blair:
Katrina is the founder of Turtle Lake Refuge. She does it all! She offers many things, including farming, growing microgreens, gleaning fruits from trees from people who don’t want their fruit, making lunches that are served to locals on a daily basis, hunting for wild foods, and more. She has so much knowledge about the earth, and I’m really eager to learn what she has to offer. I’ve emailed back and forth with Katrina, and she has informed me that I can help with just about anything and everything that Turtle Lake does, which includes all of the above that I just mentioned. I am not sure what our day-to-day schedule will be, but I have emailed Katrina and we will be in communication about it. I will assist her in the following: Preparing raw lunches, starting microgreens, and creating the microgreens book for children.
Explanation of how I came to intern at this site with this mentor:
I’ve met Katrina several times before, read an amazing newspaper article about her in the Herald, and coincidentally, she was also my ski coach when I was in preschool, (though I don’t remember it.) I’ve bought goodies from Turtle Lake at the Farmer’s Market and at other local places, and am really interested in how you can eat really healthy food from the earth that also tastes fantastic. This is what I experienced when tasting Turtle Lake’s foods. Katrina was naturally the mentor I thought of when I decided I wanted to intern at Turtle Lake. My career goals may be something of working outdoors, working for a non-profit, sustainable farming, or something of the like, which is a big reason of why I chose to intern at Turtle Lake. This experience will help me to see if this is something I could see myself doing as a career choice.
Proposed project:
At the moment, Katrina and I are entertaining a few different ideas, but the one idea that has the most base is the idea of creating a children’s book on how to grow your own microgreens. Its purpose is to be passed out to the local elementary schools to interest children in plants and growing their own microgreens, which they will be able to harvest and eat. To complete this job, I will have to acquire a knowledge about microgreens, take pictures of the steps, create a layout for the book, an overall design, and then actually put it all together. This will take much planning and thought to make it look polished, presentable, easy to understand, and most importantly, kid-friendly.
Project’s purpose, how it contributes:
The purpose of this project is to involve kids in their food and with plants. It’s to spread awareness about how plants grow (or rather, how their food grows,) and how to take care of them. It will make children curious about plants and where their food comes from and about the outdoors around them. The project will contribute to the internship site because it will support Turtle Lake Refuge, what it does, and what its ideals are. It will spread this knowledge, which is the mission of Turtle Lake.
Research:
As far as making children’s books go, I have a lot of experience. In fact, starting in 2nd grade, I’ve made little story books. In 5th grade, I made up a story about a Dasani water bottle, including a picture of him on the front with clear projector paper to make it look like an actual water bottle. In 7th grade, we were studying the ways to group living things. (Kingdom, species, family, etc.), and our task was to make a ‘field book’ about it. I took that literally, and created a booklet with journal entries, pieces of branches or hair or dirt or leaves, and everything. It was so cool! That’s what I have in mind for this booklet… something with actual or photocopied specimens. This will bring kids into the book, and it really helps to have things that you can see and touch. It gets them more engaged with the book and the learning that goes with it. However, I will have to gain more knowledge about microgreens to do well in this project. I already know some information, such as about where they grow (in little conjoined black containers,) and what they can be used for (eating raw or juicing it for a raw smoothie!) I will do a little research this weekend to get prepped, but will rely on Katrina for the main spiel, because she probably has certain ways of doing it.
Timeline:
| Day 1 | Discuss project: What kind of book—handmade/computer; Where? Pictures! | Day 9 | Pictures! Plan 6 pages/ decide which pictures /Edit (at least 45 min.) | Day 17 | Final touches (at least 45 min.) |
| Day 2 | Pictures! What needs to be included? What mtrls. needed? | Day 10 | Plan 6 pages/ decide which pictures/ Edit/ begin Layout 2 pages (at least 1 h.) | Day 18 | Final touches Whatever time needed |
| Day 3 | Pictures! What needs to be included? | Day 11 | Decide which pictures /Plan remaining pages Edit/ Layout 4 pages (at least 1 h.) | Day 19 | Final touches Whatever time needed |
| Day 4 | Pictures! What needs to be included?Edit (at least 30 min.) | Day 12 | Layout 5 pages/ Edit (at least 1.5 h.) | Day 20 | March 30th! LINK Exhibition!!! |
| Day 5 | Pictures! What needs to be included? Gather materials Edit(at least 30 min.) | Day 13 | Layout remaining pages/ Edit (at least 1.5h.) | | |
| Day 6 | Pictures! Gather mtrls./ what needs to be included? Plan 4 pages, Edit (at least 1 h.) | Day 14 | Layout cover/ Edit (at least 2 h.) | | |
| Day 7 | Pictures! Gather materials/ plan 4 pages, Edit (at least 1h.) | Day 15 | Layout back cover, final touches (at least 45 min.) | | |
| Day 8 | Pictures! Gather materials/ plan 4 pages Edit (at least 1 h.) | Day 16 | Layout book, final touches (at least 45 min.) | | |
Supplies, people, space:
I am not 100% positive on exactly what I will need, but I do know that I will need a camera, a way to print pictures, a computer to type out words and sentences, and craft supplies. Another option for publication is to create it on the internet. There are many companies out there today where you type in what you want to say, download some pictures, choose backgrounds, etc. and you have the whole thing, nice and clean and laid out, on the computer! I’ll have to check in with Katrina to see what she has in mind—doing it by hand, or doing it on the computer. (Although I’d think that doing it by hand would be less expensive.) The project, I know, will take many hours to complete, at least ten, I’d guess. This includes coming up with ideas for the book, learning the information to be put in it, to planning what goes on which page, to actually putting all the components together. There will probably be a place at Turtle Lake for me to work.
Troubleshooting:
I’ve planned this out so that if something does not go according to plan, I have plenty of time to fix it. I’m not going to hold everything out until the end, like I’ve done with other projects and papers before, but I will be steadily working through it so that nothing is left until the last minute. This makes the whole process much more easy-going, and I will not have to scramble or be really stressed out on the due date. I will have to be flexible and try to work out all the different niches in the beginning.
