Building and Planting

This week was HOT, sunny, and exciting. We put the new plastic on the hoophouse, which takes everyone. first we unrolled it next to the structure, then we pulled it taut from both ends, with people standing on ladders on either end, and unfolded it so it was over the house. we made sure it was even and then used strapping (thin pieces of wood you drill through) to pull it extra tight and secure it on both ends. Then, we pulled it down and added strapping to keep it taut halfway down the sides. The bottom part of the sides we rolled and clamped onto a long bar the whole length of the hoophouse, so we can roll up the sides and let the breeze through when it gets too hot. We'll be using the hoophouse for some of our tomatoes.

Also, we worked on seeding a lot. Today, on our second big volunteer day, we had loads of folks come out and help plant potatoes. I mostly worked placing potatoes in front of the people planting them with Matthew (age 10) and Abigail (who will turn 8 next week). At the same time, we got to have our first wild food - ramps! Ramps are wild leeks which grow in the woods in the Northeast. Last weekend Don gathered a bunch and Bridget used them in a frittata.

But the veggie of the week here is asparagus. Sunday, Katie and I went to see "Asparagus: a Stalkumentary" in Williamstown, which talks about asparagus growers in Oceana County, Michigan, and how they are struggling to stay in farming after a US drug war initiative supports farmers in Peru and Chile in growing asparagus instead of coca. We got to meet some nearby farmers there, and this week Don harvested the first asparagus here.


We also learned how to lay black plastic. Also a big group job - it works best with four people. First, you dig a trench across the end of the bed, put the end of the roll of plastic in the trench, and cover it with dirt and step on it to hold it. then two people unroll the plastic about halfway down the bed, and hold it down where they stop by putting buckets of rocks on it. the other two people start hoeing along the plastic, just underneath the edges to thint he bed and leave a bunch of dirt in the pathways. The first two people follow them, pushing this dirt on top of the edges of the plastic and firming it down by crawling on it. Then once you get tot he end of the bed, you dig the other trench and bury the other end.


Caretaker is in this beautiful valley, so we also have tons of wildlife. We hear coyotes about half the nights, and every night as I walk back to the cabin I hear tons of frogs at some of the ponds on the farm. You can look in and seed the egg masses and the tadpoles in this top pond (it's spring fed, so super cold, but good for dips once it gets warmer out!)

semana dos

Week two highlights:
1. getting licked all over by pigs
2. Flame weeding
3. Fires!

For week two, I figured I would describe our daily schedule a bit. We started the last two weeks at 6:45 am (tomorrow we switch to 6:15, when we start for the rest of the season). we do chores, which rotate weekly. this week I was on greenhouse duty, next week I'm on animals. Then we come in for breakfast. Bridget makes these amazing breakfasts. It's like having a sunday breakfast everyday. pancakes or oatmeal with applesauce and yogurt on top (and good yogurt - she makes it from the milk from Cricket Creek farm, just 2 miles up the road). At breakfast we have our daily meeting going over what work needs to happen today. on Mondays we also go for a 30 minute farm walk to talk about big jobs for the week. then we work until about 10:30, when we go in for a 15 minute break, and then head back out until lunch at 1. we start up at 2:30 and work til 6, with the last half hour or so also being chores. And we each have a day to cook lunch and dinner (I cook on fridays). you get an hour to cook. it feels like "Iron chef: on the farm". You try to use leftovers in creative ways like they are the secret ingredient. as we start to get more veggies on the farm i think it will be even more exciting. At the moment, there are still onions and carrots from last year, and then frozen berries, and lots of canned goodies to work with.

This week, we learned how to lay row cover. We fill about 50 bags with soil as weights, and then someone holds the roll at an end of the field as the other two walk it out, unrolling as they go. You can see our first covered row here.

We also learned how to flame weed. The idea behind flame weeding is that you take a blowtorch and pass quickly right over the bed after seeding but just before your plants germinate. The heat doesn't affect seeds (the layer of soil helps to insulate them) but it boils the water in the cell walls of plants that are already up (ideally, weeds). Although a couple of the spinach plants were up, less than 10% of them had germinated so I got to flame weed our 2 spinach beds. Hopefully, that means the spinach has a clean bed to start in and apprentices have a little less weeding to do down the line.



Tuesday, we lit fires all morning. I started with the raspberry canes on the river field. The canes got cut and then raked into a huge pile to help deter any spreading disease in the raspberry patch. Fire when through those fast! Then I worked on another fire by the creek. It was a pretty awesome morning...

Wednesday, we moved compost. All year, farm members are welcome to bring vegetable food wastes to the farm and they put it in a big bin by the distribution area. So we took apart the bin and pitched the compost into the tractor, and Melissa dumped it on the big compost pad lower down in the farm for it to finish. It was pretty smelly but the worms and the layers in the compost pile were amazing!





Saturday, we went to our first CRAFT event. CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Apprentice Farmer Training) is a cooperative program between farms to allow for greater networking and training opportunities for apprentices. We drove about an hour to Hawthorne Vally farm, and met about 35 other apprentices from over a dozen nearby farms. Pretty cool so far. This weekend, I was on "weekend duty", so I stuck around town, doing some errands, watching "Aparagus: a Stalkumentary" at the little independent theater downtown, and watered the greenhouse and took care of the animals. and this morning, I dumped pig feed all down my shirt. well, once I got into the pig pen the pigs were totally delighted to see me and nibbled off any feed they could find on my shoes, pants, arms, etc. Definitely makes the shower worthwhile :)

Caretaker Farm, Week 1

we just finished our first week as apprentices at Caretaker Farm, and I'm working hard to keep up my goal of writing a blog each week. So here's a bit of an intro to the farm. Caretaker Farm (caretakerfarm.org) was started by Sam and Elizabeth Smith, and Don and Bridget took over 3 years ago. All the food is distributed through a CSA, where members come to pick up a share of food once a week from June until the root veggies run out (around February). Each adult member of the farm is also required to volunteer on the farm. Today we had our first volunteer day, an event called "Rock the Farm". Volunteers (especially families with little kids) came out and helped us pick big rocks out of the fields and load them into buckets and then into the tractor. We also put two new sets of discs on the disc harrow (it's in the picture on the left). You pull this through the fields behind a tractor to turn the soil over before you plant.

This week, we learned how to do animal chores (feed and water pigs, cows and chickens). Here's a picture of the cows on the pasture. The white ones are Lukey, Lucy and Lina, and the brown one is Chloe. All of them except Lina are pregnant and will calve between May and July. and then we'll start to milk Chloe after that.

As apprentices, we live in cabins on the farm. Katie and I live in the cabin on the right, and Geoff and Melissa live in the cabin on the left. It makes for the best commute ever...10 minute walk through the fields, where you can hear the frogs and see the stars at night.

More later! I'm off to Boston to rescue my car.

Boston day 1200...Williamstown day 1

I had a great last week in Boston, building raised beds, seeing folks from TFP and roommates. Tuesday, Liz and I got pedometers from our friends Derek and Leslie. Derek started a pedometer club for his mom and her friends and keeps up a google document where everyone can put in their # of steps each day. I'm trying to see if working on the farm increases my average steps. so far, this is inconclusive, because (in addition to insufficient data so far) it wasn't really working where I had it mounted this morning, so after working and walking around the entire farm this morning, it had registered 1600 steps. Whereas after lunch, walking much less, it was at 4500. So we will compare with some more reliable data soon.

Wednesday 69 Elm had a potluck with veggie white bean soup, pasta, tortilla pizza and chocolate souffle, and i got to catch up with Becky and the roommates. Thursday i heard from joey that my car wasn't going to be ready until Monday/Tuesday. so i freaked out. then i got coffee. then I called anim. i talked to him about different plans for 20 minutes. then i got off the phone and called him back and totally reversed all my plans. Anyway, I went out to lincoln to make sure all my stuff was packed and I could remember where it was and to prioritize what i took to make sure i took the most important stuff, got to walk around town a bit, and then Kate, Karen and Daniel came back to the growers house for dinner. We headed to concord next for the Contra dance, and all my roommates came and gave it a try!

Friday I worked with Kathleen and Heidi, from Groundwork Lawrence, building raised beds in the morning in the rain, and then had salt cod at Antonio's Cafe in front of the office. so good. it's nice to have a good option so close to the city office, with lots of veggies so seems pretty healthy. They say they have coffee but i have a feeling it's nescafe. i've seen the bottle. one of my favorite signs in chile was on a menu:

nescafe
real coffee

much better. i'm totally ok with nescafe, but don't pass it off as the same thing. Israel was all into nescafe too. in my eyes, it's almost a food crisis.

not as big as the true financial crisis happening in argentina. there is no change in the whole country. it's really a problem. you go into a town (not such a big deal in Buenos aires, but still) and you have 100 pesos ($30 bill, granted it's big, but it's the only thing you can get out of an ATM). and NO ONE will cash it. sometimes even the grocery stores will refuse.

but i digress.

Friday night, Liz, Mel and Mel's friend Valerie and I went out to the Phoenix Landing for a good night of dancing to 80's music and the new justin timberlake. There were gin and tonics, there were guys talking to me about cognitive psychology in front of the speakers who were totally sexist ("my boss is a woman, but she's pretty good at science"), there was dancing. and at the end of the day, i'd taken 28,145 steps. so there were also sore feet.

Saturday Mel and I rode to JP to hit up Canto 6, the fabulous bakery at Washington & Green St where Becky is the new pastry chef! we had chocolate croissants, a ham, bacon and cheddar biscuit, brioche, almond biscuits, a beet sandwich...and got to watch Becky using the sheeter to make croissants and then put a little strip of chocolate in each before folding them. so cool. My roommate Emily joined me to try it out too.

Sunday, Michael Iceland picked me up, helped me pack up my stuff in Lincoln while his dog Tala rolled around in the pond/marsh/mud pit behind the growers house, and drove me out to western mass. along the way i got to stop and meet his best friend from college's grandparents and parents, and check out his property in readsboro VT. We ate at the Readsboro Inn...so amazing. I tried hash for the first time (corned beef and mashed potatoes put back on the griddle). We got to the farm around 3 and got unpacked and met my cabinmate Katie, who just moved up here from Baltimore, but has also worked for a fruit farmer in southern PA and knows a bunch of the MD and DC markets. The 3rd apprentice is Melissa, who did the apprenticeship 2 years ago so is here as a 2nd year, and her husband Geoff, who's helping out a couple days a week and starting his own internet business the other couple days. Bridget made chili and butternut squash...and the chocolate zucchini cake i remember from visiting Caretaker 3 summers ago! Micah, their 20 month old, is about the smiliest kid i've ever met. even though he had pinkeye today, he seems like he's always happy and laughing and smiling and in a good mood. Gabriela was showing me birds in her bird book. This is incredible. This 4 year old telling me which starlings she sees in her yard and pointing them out in a bird book.

Today we had our first day on the farm. We did animal chores first: feeding the chicks, pigs and Chloe, the milk cow. Chloe is due to calve in early june, and the vet said she needs to gain weight so Don's been giving her some extra grain each day. She's pretty psyched about that. And then we let all the cows (Chloe, Lucy, Lukey and Lina) out to pasture. Then we went on a long farm tour, and then started turning over some beds to let them dry out so that we can plant in them soon. the soil here is a lot more clayey than in lincoln, so it holds a lot of water. We seeded some flats in the greenhouse, started to build the cold frames (where we will "harden off" seedlings when it is warm enough for them to come out of the greenhouse, but still too cold for them to be out all night). For lunch Bridget made rolls and I had hummus and sprout salad sandwiches.

off to bed...