Hello, Growing To Give Community!
I’m sitting down to write the farm report and am entirely overwhelmed by how much has happened at the farm in the last month. I will do my best to start writing more frequently to keep you updated on the everchanging activities at the farm. I also invite you all to follow us on social media where we will be featuring much more of our day-to-day adventures, posting about upcoming farm projects, and sharing the progress of our crops along with useful farm tips and educational content.
Farm Skills participants learning to make a new garden bed with the lasagna mulching method.
We have had quite the streak of rainy Saturdays this year! It became a running joke with the Farm Skills program participants who had almost exclusively rainy class days. Our Open Farm event was not spared from the pattern of the rainy Saturdays, but it was a real joy to share the farm with those of you who came out to tour on the cool, damp day! We enjoyed showing you all our various projects and beautiful crops, potting up seedlings, and socializing with everyone who attended.
Farm staff, board members, and visitors on Open Farm Day!
Despite the unusually rainy spring, we’ve had enough gorgeous weather to dry the soil out enough to fill our fields. The flowers aren’t in bloom yet, but the spring crops look fabulous enough to be worth a visit. The stars of the show in May were radishes and turnips and a gorgeous variety of lettuce called Capitan that has become a firm favorite. In addition to spring roots and lettuce, we’ve been harvesting rhubarb, chives, dill, oregano, bunching onions, kale, and now Swiss chard. As of the first week of June, we have donated just shy of 1500 lbs of produce to our community partners!
In addition to those more familiar crops, the new perennial vegetable plants that were started last year for the Wabanaki Mobile Food Pantry (WMFP) are finally mature. We were able to harvest some beautiful Turkish Rocket and Good King Henry for them in late May and will be harvesting for WFMP twice a month through the summer season.
High school senior, Adala, with Good King Henry and Riley, our UMaine Extension Horticulture Intern with Turkish Rocket Raab.
Thanks to the many, many student groups here to volunteer and high schoolers completing community service hours, we were able to tackle the big spring push to get all the weeds under control and fields ready for planting. We hosted students 3-5 days a week in May, and though we don’t have pictures to share of them, they bring so much energy and momentum to the farm!! We’ve had many other amazing volunteer groups help us get underway this spring. Among them, the Wright Pierce Engineering team came out and assembled two plots of tomato trellises and transplanted all the tomatoes too! Just a few days later, a cohort from Blue Marble Geographic transplanted all the basil and marigolds in rows besides the tomatoes to offer some pest protection and pollination support.
Wright Pierce assembling trellis and Blue Marble planting basil and marigold.
We’re already seeing baby zucchini growing and are (so far) winning our daily battle against cucumber beetles. Good thing we have our brand new summer interns to help us out! We will be introducing them on our social media over the coming weeks, so make sure to follow us to learn about them and the projects they’ll be working on while they’re with us this season!
Growing to Give Interns!
I also want to do a shout out to all of our regular volunteers who don’t often make the farm reports but without whom we couldn’t grow this beautiful produce! We’re endlessly grateful to you all! To Doug for keeping the grass mowed – without him we’d absolutely never have time to get all the farming done! To our weekly volunteers we can count on to help with the seeding, watering, weeding, harvesting, and everything in between! And to our stalwart Fix-It crew who are always available to innovate DIY cable trellis systems, repair essential tools and infrastructure, address urgent electrical issues, and help troubleshoot irrigation issues.
Non-glamorous farm reality: Broken Irrigation (Left) – Shiny fixed Irrigation (Middle) -Thanks to Burnham for coming over in a hurry to help us out! Tomatoes trellised in tunnel – cable trellis DIY’s by Fix-It crew (Right).
This community is so amazing, and we’re grateful for all of you – our newest members and those who’ve been with Growing To Give since its beginning – and everyone in between! We always look forward to seeing you here on the farm when you can come out. We’ve started our summer donation schedule and will be doing some harvesting most mornings Monday through Friday. Harvest volunteer shifts will be the 8:15 time slot if you can join us! Other regular work we’ll have in the coming weeks include: trellising/suckering tomato plants, weeding vegetable and perennial beds, weed whacking, and some planting and seeding.
With care,
Lindsay Wasko
Farm Director
P.S. Wondering how to support our work? Our Wish List includes the items that help us grow and give more to our community. Every bit counts!