A lot to share this week!
As the school year comes to a close, Martha, our Education Coordinator, has calculated that we have hosted over 230 volunteers from our local schools–from the 1st and 2nd graders from Brightfield School to our latest visit from the gap year students attending Seguinland Institute!
Let me tell you a bit about what was accomplished with all this youthful energy.
The youngest group from Brightfield planted 100 Long Pie Pumpkin seeds into paper pots, which are now healthy happy seedlings.
The folks from Seguinland planted 120 Hablitzia seedlings into our new perennial edible plot. Hablitzia is a perennial relative of spinach and it climbs! Its season starts earlier and lasts longer than spinach. Bob and Diana assembled cow panels down the middle of the bed to support this climbing vine.
Gabrielle planted the Good King Henry, another edible vine, alongside more newly installed cow panels.
We were very fortunate to have four seniors from local schools volunteering with us these past weeks. Norah, Maya, and Luci are about to graduate from Freeport High School, and Marin is a senior at the Waldorf School. These young women helped finish off planting 800 Swiss Chard seedlings, filled a grow tunnel with 320 cucumber plants, added herbs and eggplants to tunnel 5 which is now full with 133 eggplants and 133 Carmen red peppers. They learned how to set up irrigation systems and were a huge help in setting up and planting our new 50-foot bed of Sochan. This is another “new to us “ edible perennial. It is in the Rudbeckia family, the leaves are edible and, I can testify, “very tasty”. It took many hands to get this prepped and planted in one day. It is complete and the transplants have already taken off!
Collards were the last of our cool weather crops to go in this week. Now it’s a push for warmer weather seedlings to go in the ground. We have started planting the tomatoes–600 in so far with another 350 left to plant.
Rhubarb season is in full swing. Mary and Diane came and picked about 90 pounds for MCHPP. Dave shared these photos to show the rubarb’s transformation to compote. That was just part of one bed, and we have four huge beds. We will be sending out a lot more rhubarb this week to other locations.
The Fixers fixed everything on our extensive list of requests and have started on a new, sturdy, wind resistant, end wall on the tan shed. This will be so much easier than fighting with those darn zippers! Thank you, Fixers!
A special thank you to Doug for coming over and mowing twice a week. I don’t know what we would do without you, Doug. Hopefully more help is on the way. Thanks also to Rick, from the Farm Skills team, for picking up that weed wacker and walking the deer fence. I don’t have a photo of either of them, but I have many of how neat and tidy the farm looks because of their efforts. Thanks, guys.
I was amazed at how many volunteers came on Saturday morning. I had Cameron take a selfie of all of us to show all the smiling faces in the beautiful warm sunshine. Thanks, everyone, for giving up part of your holiday weekend to come volunteer.
It was a bittersweet potluck lunch on Saturday. The food was delicious, but it was the last day for our Farm Skills trainees. This was a great group to get to work with, and I hope they are able to utilize these experiences and the knowledge they gained in different ways in their future dirt work!
Always grateful,
Theda