Well, not sure about gloom of night, but we have harvested in the other 3 conditions and Monday was a true test of our team and our Monday gleaners. The skies opened up and dumped on everyone. Here are some photos showing everyone totally drenched as they packed up the boxes for delivery. They persevered and harvested almost 300 pounds that were donated. When Judy drops off the donations at Woodside, they are artfully arranged for the residents to shop at their very own farmers market. This is such a lovely gesture of appreciation.

On Tuesday afternoon, our intern Sophia presented about her work at Growing to Give to the Environmental Studies department at Bowdoin college. Our interns will be leaving us soon, so be sure to ask them about their experience when you see them next!

 

Wednesday, Dina and Sarah harvested wheelbarrow loads of bunching onions as Sophia and Annie started planting the 1,800 more bunching onion seedlings for a September harvest. Peppers, beets, tomatoes, cabbage, chard, and lots of beautiful fresh herbs also went out for donation with this Wednesday gleaning.

We had our annual group of Hannaford interns come on Thursday. 15 of them arrived just in time for our garlic harvest. They pulled, weighed, cleaned, and hung our entire plot of Music garlic. The garlic was sorted for seed garlic, donation garlic, and garlic that will be available for sale by donation. This was such a huge help. A project that would usually take us a couple of days to accomplish was completed in just a few hours. Always a positive, energetic group when they arrive at the farm, and they left us with a donation of garden gloves. Thanks to the interns and Hannaford!

Friday was so busy! We had two groups of youth from Apogee come to volunteer, who weeded various plots around the farm and flipped tunnel 5 in the heat of the afternoon, planting beet and cucumber seedlings. Rachel McDonald, a friend of Growing to Give, allows me to burden her with being one of our volunteer sign painters. She painted two signs for us this year designating the sheds. We now have an official GARDEN SHED and TOOL SHED. Thanks, Rachel, for putting up with my requests. Everyone thinks the signs are lovely, and the Fix-It Team was happy to install them.

Diana and Judy worked in the greenhouse training our late cucumber planting to climb up the strings. Carolyn and her team of gleaners came to harvest, and Vera officially opened the cherry tomato snack bar. All I had to say to her and Finn was that the snack bar was open, and they knew exactly what that meant. Finn does not like to eat cherry tomatoes, but he does like to overload his sister with what he picks. Vera ate all of them! Later they emptied broken sand bags into a pile for me, then spent some time building sand castles. Finn later led an expedition out to the beneficial hedgerow and identified all the butterflies, hummingbird moths, and hummingbirds for us adults. As Carrie remarked, “the hedgerow is doing what it was designed to do.” Nice job, Carrie–your design is beautiful in all seasons. With all the milkweed in the hay fields and nectar sources throughout the farm, I am wondering if we could apply to be a MONARCH WAYSTATION. We will have to look into the possibility.

Saturday brought another group of young people. Six volunteers from Holy Family Parish came and helped finish off the bunching onion project in the very hot sun. I promised a shady seed starting project next, which sounded good to everyone. Genevieve has become a master at making soil blocks and does a great job giving instructions to our new volunteers. Under her guidance over 500 Napa cabbage seedlings were started for planting and a Fall harvest. Darcy wanted to help, but wasn’t quite sure what to do, so she fed the goats and picked flowers instead.

Sabrina and her husband, John, are on vacation in Maine and also came on Saturday. Thanks to both of them for spending some of their vacation with us as volunteers. We had some interesting conversations, and I hope we see you both here in Maine permanently some time soon.

That is just a snapshot of what is going on at the farm. This coming Saturday is the FarmYard Jam, so we have also been trying to tidy up and make everything look spectacular. There will be a couple of farm tours for those who are interested and hopefully our plants will be showing off our no-till method.

Thanks everyone for helping us help others.

 

Theda