Gardeners experiment every time they sow a new vegetable, and sometimes it fails: blighted tomatoes, moth-eaten cabbage, plants that never flower. “That’s part of gardening,” said Noel Harradine, a master gardener volunteer with @ccecornell Wayne County, one of more than 100 CCE gardeners across the state working to take some trial and error out of the process by testing varieties to find what grows best in New York. Harradine’s work is part of CCE’s statewide Vegetable Variety Trial Garden program, a long-standing initiative to help New York gardeners choose the best-performing varieties for their regions. Across 37 counties this year, master gardener volunteers have sown select vegetables in CCE garden beds and are now collecting data and evaluating vegetables for taste, yield, and ease of growing. The observations are collected in a public web forum and shared with Cornell researchers and extension staff, as well as the sponsoring seed company. Read more: news.cornell.edu/stories/202…

For four days each February, volunteers fan out around the globe to record local bird sightings, capturing a remarkable worldwide snapshot of avian populations. The event, co-run by the Lab of Ornithology, is known as the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC)—and it just keeps getting bigger. The 2026 count drew (per initial numbers) some 1.15 million people from 216 countries or eBird subregions. They made 1.24 million Merlin identifications and submitted nearly 470,000 eBird checklists—all told, spotting more than 8,200 avian species. And here’s another whopping number: this year, GBBC participants made nearly a quarter-million submissions of media to the Lab’s Macaulay Library, the archive that houses more than 95 million photos, videos, and sounds. Check out alumni.cornell.edu/cornellia… for a small sampling of the eye-popping images submitted during the 2026 bird count.

Flowers, frisbees, and fresh air: Spring at Cornell, across decades ☀🌷🌸 Photos courtesy of the @Cornell_Library Rare and Manuscript Collections.