Week 3, Spring ‘21
By Remi Welbel
It’s our third week here and our ideas are tumbling down like the rain outside.
Monday, the rain brought with it our turtlenecks and sweaters as we sat around the kitchen table and held our All Hands Meeting. After dispersing, Sophia, Lilly, and Jesse endured the weather to fix our strawberry and spinach hoop houses that had been blown over by the wind.
Then, we got to work inside on our organizational responsibilities. Our farm management and funding groups gathered together to discuss our overarching vision and plan what funding we would like to secure for our farming, research, community building, and educational initiatives. Later, we met as a community to plan our Pesach (Passover) seder and talk about meaningful old and new traditions we can bring to our table.
For dinner, Jesse and Shachar made stir-fried veggies with rice. After dinner, Lilly shared her hometown. It was such a beautiful time for our community to connect and a wonderful continuation from Brendan and Jesse’s hometowns.
Tuesday, the sky was gloomy, but our excitement for the new day was bright! After our check-in meeting, we got to work. Our funding team made progress on several grants and prepared for a late afternoon meeting with our partners at the Delta Institute. Meanwhile, our outreach and communications working groups began our official fall apprenticeship recruitment. If you know anyone 18+ who is interested in joining our community this fall, our application will be coming out soon!
Later in the day, our apiculture group continued their hive research to determine what apiculture system makes the most sense for our farm. On the outdoor front, we pH sampled our test plots and inserted flags to map out where our basalt will be spread in the fields.
For dinner, Brendan and Sophia made black beans with corn and mango salsa with quinoa and tres leches for dessert
Wednesday, the sun was still hiding, but it felt like our sunniest day yet! We came together for our morning check-in, set daily goals, debated what root vegetable we most strongly identified with, and got to work! Inside, we submitted a grant that was in the works and worked on creating our own Haggadah (the text recited) for the Pesach seder.
In the greenhouse, we seeded up a storm. We seeded swiss chard, romaine, parsley, red peppers, hot peppers, bok choy, basil, lavender, tomatoes, microgreens, beets, and more! Outside, we activated our batch of biochar and prepared to plant our first trees. We could barely contain our excitement! Using a post-earth auger, a tool that looks like a big drill, we dug out holes for each of our trees. Using trowels, we customized each hole for our young bare-root apple trees to ensure the right width and depth for their unique root structures. Planting our first trees felt like a truly pivotal moment in our community. From planning where they would be planted in the fall, to selecting and ordering species in the winter, to finally putting them into the ground yesterday, I am overcome with joy and gratitude for all the people who helped us get to this point! Shout out to the fall apprentices who continued to work all winter long to ensure that we were ready to plant, and shout out to the spring apprentices who worked tirelessly yesterday to get the trees planted before the rain came down.
After planting, we ran inside to escape the rain and join a research meeting with a lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign that does similar basalt research as the lab Gavi works with at Yale. It was incredibly informative and really added to our team’s understanding of the research we are doing.
For dinner, Gavi and Lilly made a gorgeous celebratory dinner! We had miso soup, roasted daikons, rice, cucumber salad, roasted sweet potatoes, and peanut sauce. After dinner, Gavi shared her hometown and we had another wonderful evening bonding as a community and celebrating all that we have accomplished together.
Thursday brought with it more rain, but we had a productive, mellow day of indoor work. We continued working on our Haggadah, reached out to more organizations and schools for fall apprentice recruitment, worked on determining how to procure manure for our soil research, and cleaned up the greenhouse from all of our seeding yesterday.
In the evening, we had a context conversation surrounding Judaism. Given ZA’s Jewish bedrock or Jewish basalt bedrock as we like to say, we felt it was important to really delve into the context of establishing a Jewish farm and organization. Shachar gave us a wonderful overview of Jewish thought and led us in a discussion of how Judaism fits into our work.
For dinner, Gavi and Hannah made stir-fried adzuki beans with tomatoes, carrots, and celery, cucumber salad, roasted acorn squash, roasted golden beets, and incredible homemade masa tortillas.
Friday, the sun finally made an appearance! We gathered for our check-in meeting, set goals, discussed our favorite type of shoe (chunky soles all around), and got to work. At 10:00 am, we met with Kurt Spokas, one of the researchers we work with, to get a run-down on our biochar lab analyses. We learned that our biochar was very high in carbon for our small-scale production! Our wood and nutshell biochar were about 80% carbon content, while our corn was about 61% carbon. The wood and nutshell carbon contents were similar because the feedstocks have similar cellular structures. However, the corn releases more carbon as it burns and therefore does not store as much carbon. From our lab analysis, we also found that our activated biochar was more reactive than our unactivated biochar. However, the biochar itself from the activated samples is not necessarily more reactive. It is more likely that the compounds that were absorbed from soaking in our compost mixture are reacting. We can infer that activated biochar is microbially favorable because it has a higher reactivity with oxygen, meaning microbes can degrade it faster. Microbes can’t do anything with unactivated biochar because they need nutrients to survive and thrive. Our primary takeaway from our meeting with Kurt is that having a sense of whether the carbon in the biochar is stable for a year, or thousands of years is the most crucial determinant in biochar research. The only true way to determine this is to set up an experiment that would run over 1,000 years. However, because this is not a feasible research goal, another way of approximating carbon storage is to use kinetic modeling over a much shorter period, 6 months or so, to try to estimate the half-life. Even just determining whether biochar is durable for more or less than 10 years would be a critical finding in the biochar community.
After our meeting, we finished our Pesach Haggadah, thinned out our spinach, took pH samples in our test plots, and researched grants that we may be interested in applying for.
In the evening, Jesse and I prepared our rainbow Shabbat dinner! We made tomato sauce (red), whipped sweet potatoes (orange), spaghetti squash (yellow), sauteed greens and salad (green), blueberry compote for dessert (blue), purple cabbage slaw (indigo/violet), and rainbow-shaped challot (complete with smoked paprika, turmeric, and zaatar colored strands). We each dressed as a color of the rainbow, sang Kabbalat Shabbat songs, ate together, and did our traditional fill-jar oneg!
Saturday night, Shachar made a beautiful dinner with sauteed cabbage, kasha varnishkes, white beans with kale, and salad.
It has been such an exciting week at the farm! We can’t wait to plant more trees and continue to grow as a community.