Hello, Growing To Give Community!

You know it’s really peak summer when you’ve started picking tomatoes and peppers and can’t quite keep up with harvesting the beans! Our cucumbers are unfortunately not producing very much – the plants contracted bacterial wilt, a cucumber beetle borne disease, that slowly took them out despite our best efforts to keep them in check. Alas! It sounds like this has been common in past seasons, so I’ll be thinking about the best course of action moving forward. We have a few good ideas inspired by our recent visit to the Bowdoin College Organic Garden. On the bright side, the cucumbers that we did get were gorgeous and delicious, and we have a few plants still producing.
Ripening tomatoes and the results of a 300 pound harvest for MCHPP.
Another piece of not so wonderful news, is that we are fairly certain that we’ve found jumping worms on the farm. At first we thought it was confined to a single plot, so we decided to sacrifice all the plants there (sorry, little watermelons!) and attempt to solarize the plot. The high temperatures reached during solarization are supposed to be enough to kill any jumping worm eggs. Since then, we have done substantial digging and mustard solution checks around the farm and think we’ve found them in at least one other plot. Some good news is that we’re nowhere near the first farm in Maine to get these worms and will benefit from the cumulative knowledge of local farmers who are already finding creative ways to build soil despite their presence. We will still be having everyone clean their shoes as they come onto the farm and recommend cleaning them again before you leave to prevent the spread of jumping worms. There are several varieties of jumping worms and preventing the spread is still important for our ecosystem. We really appreciate your taking the time to wash your shoes to help protect our soil in Maine. Pro tip: many of our volunteers have a pair of shoes that they reserve just for Growing To Give or their home gardens. Whether you’re trying to keep worms off the properties that you frequent or know you have worms at home and want to prevent spreading them elsewhere, having different pairs of shoes is a good way to manage it. Please feel free to reach out with more questions!
Our new informational jumping worms signs designed by our awesome volunteer Christine Terrell.

On a more cheery note, our July was brimming with student groups. We had a wonderful high school youth group from St. Thomas Aquinas in NH come for a total of four full days of farm work! They raised funds this year to purchase tools and make a financial donation and also worked hard transplanting seedlings, weeding, and spreading wood chips. They also got to make handchurned ice cream with our lovely Education Coordinator, Martha, and spent some reflective time journaling. We’re so grateful to all of them for choosing Growing To Give as the recipient of their dedicated work and fundraising efforts! Other groups that came include Bowdoin Upward Bound who volunteered twice this month – they really took spreading wood chips in the pathways to a whole new level of perfection – and several Apogee groups that stuck through some truly daunting weeding assignments along with lots of woodchipping. It’s amazing what a group of students can accomplish in just a few hours!! Their energy brings so much momentum and excitement to the farm.

July capped off with a lovely volunteer group from Hannaford who harvested all of our garlic, planted a trial succession of snap peas (can we grow them in the fall?) amongst the lettuce, and spread some wood chips for us. They were such good sports to work through the on and off rain through so many tasks and had so many great questions about climate-friendly farming practices. And Hannaford will donate $1 for every $2.50 reusable Hannaford Fight Hunger Bag sold during the month of August at their Topsham store (49 Topsham Fair Mall Road, Topsham ME)!
Beautifully wood chipped pathways, courtesy of Apogee volunteers, and garlic hanging to dry.
In the last two weeks, we’ve said farewell to three of our four college interns: Fiona (Bowdoin College) whose summer project was filming a documentary about the story of Growing to Give and the journey the donated food takes from the farm through our local gleaning food networks to recipients, Erik (Bates College) whose project is a complex soil science experiment measuring biological life and nutrient levels with different combinations of intercropped plants and “weeds,” and Idil (Bowdoin) who used ArcGIS to create an interactive map of the farm that digitized several years of passed crop rotation data to aid in our crop planning process. Additionally, Briar, our wonderful seasonal farm hand from the Farm Skills Training Program has come to the end of his time at the farm. They’ve all been an absolute joy to have on the farm this summer. They bring with them insatiable curiosity, hardcore work ethics, great senses of humor, a love of games and goofy fun, and top notch cooking skills. We had so much fun with them this season and were excited that they liked Growing to Give so much that they all brought friends to volunteer at the farm on several occasions. We are a bit forlorn without them and are glad we still have a few more weeks with our remaining college intern Jessica (USM). To send them all off with a bit of good-hearted competition, we ended our last week all together with “Farm Olympics,” in which all the interns competed in various events such as speed weeding and broad forking as well as silly events including a cartwheel competition.
Intern Idil broad forking impressively fast (left) and interns Fiona and Erik accepting their first and second place medals for the cartwheeling competition (right).
Finally, I want to thank you all as always for all that you do to support our work. So far this season, we’ve donated over 6,000 pounds of produce and worked with hundreds of volunteers and students. It’s hard to believe that the summer is halfway past with the biggest harvest months still to come! As we enter into peak harvest season with so many fewer hands on the farm, we will need more volunteer support throughout the week to keep the weeds at bay, harvest on Wednesdays and Fridays, and haul around loads of wood chips and straw. If you haven’t come out this year and are wondering if we need a hand, now is a great time to check in!
With great gratitude,
Lindsay Wasko
Farm Director

P.S. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our fall fundraiser, Dancing to Give, happening the evening of October 11th at Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport for those age 21 and up. Stay tuned for more details!