Monday: Today was another amazing harvest day. New produce this week includes cauliflower, cilantro, leaf fennel, and garlic scapes. Garlic scapes for anyone who has yet to try them are a great early season produce item. The are slightly fibrous and very garlic flavored so make sure you cook them. The simplest way is to treat them like green beans, stir-fry 'em, boil them in a soup or steam them. this afternoon was very hot, but we pushed through and harvested 76 pints of strawberries. These strawberries will be for our CSA members, two pints this week, and for sale in the cooler. We will also be initiating a U-pick program for strawberries where you may come to the farm and pick as many pints of strawberries as you like. The pints you pick will be $ 2.00/pint(the normal price is $2.50).
Tuesday: This morning I went to Tracey Hall's Grace Note Farm, one of our cooperative instructors. Tracey has an amazingly diverse farm with goats, layer chickens, broilers, turkeys, ducks, honey bees, and a vegetable and flower garden. Tracey makes goats milk soap and cheese, sells multi-colored eggs, and also sells chickens and turkeys for meat. Obviously there is a lot I can learn from this experience and the days I spend with her. After lunch, Janet and I hid form the heat and worked on freezing and bagging strawberries. The strawberries are in one pound bags and will be sold later this season when the fresh strawberries are gone.
Wednesday: Today was day 3 of this heat wave, but we still accomplished a lot. I worked on setting up the trellises for the tomatoes that are growing outdoors in the Children's Garden. So far so good, and next we move on to setting up the trellises in the hoop house (hopefully the we'll get a break from the heat). After weaving the trellises I jumped into helping Shawn, Mara and Kirsten finish up processing the rest of the harvest for the CSA pick-up tonight. This included washing and trimming cauliflower and broccoli, weighing out bags of sugar snap peas, and washing romaine lettuce. After the mid-day siesta I started out brewing a batch of equisetum tea which I will use on the tomatoes sometime this week. While the tea simmered I mixed up a batch of fertilizer (chicken manure and kelp) for the peppers in the hoop house. Every plant recieved a generous tablespoon of this mixture and hopefully we will reap the rewards later in the summer. I finished out the day pulling thistles in the walkways of the hoop house.
Thursday: I had today off and it was great to have a rest/recovery day.
Friday: This morning started off with a lot of work, I worked on putting in the last of the t-posts in the hoop house. After that I set up the trellises for the tomatoes in the hoop house. Other students worked on planting pickling cucumbers in the solar house. In the afternoon we, the students, attended a lecture on energy use and conservation in relation to agriculture. We were also fortunate enough to see the workings of the PV solar panels here at MFAI and see the batteries that the panels charge. Essentially the pv panels around MFAI charge two large batteries that will keep the cooler running for 36-48 hours if grid supplied power goes out.
Saturday: This morning I woke up early and prepared a comfrey and nettle tea, used as foliar feed where comfrey provides potassium and nettle supplies trace minerals. I sprayed everything in the solanaceae family: tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. After spraying I moved into harvesting strawberries, we picked around 80 pints today. I finished up the morning by mulching the walkways between tomato rows with straw.
