Week 1, Spring 2025

Hello all, and welcome to ZA’s fifth full growing season! I don’t know if you’ve heard the news but — spring is raucously, colorfully, joyfully arrived! The sugar maples are resting after a thrilling two weeks of maple tapping last month, our first seedlings are starting to harden off in the chilly sun and yearn for soil, the apricot trees are bursting into beautiful white flowers, and our weekend walks in the woods are becoming more colorful every week.

Allow me to introduce the cast of characters this spring (you may recognize a few):

Eric (cleaning up our messes, per usual)

Patricia (holding the house together with dish duty and laughter)

Margalit (a grimy gremlin)

Gavi (absolutely in their element)

Acacia (somehow still looking stylish after planting trees all day)

Claire (yours truly! most likely to try to convince you of the merits of reggaeton as a genre)

Stories from the week:

Monday, March 31st:

Daniella (from last fall’s cohort) is here visiting us all week, gracing us with stories from the architecture conference she attended last weekend and plans to finish diagrams of last year’s Sukkah.

The spinach planted by the fall cohort in the high tunnel has been growing zealously and nourishing us abundantly these past few weeks. Our bucket-watering system for the spinach (since we haven’t yet turned on irrigation for the season) is labor-intensive, but it is paying dividends: some leaves are the size of my face! I’m discovering that spinach is maybe impossible to get tired of: Endless spinach salads, spinach sauces, and a delectable spinach challah made by Margalit a few weeks ago have only made me more grateful for our spinach abundance.

After work, we had a joyful afternoon dancing at Gavi’s Moped class and visiting Hannah’s baby goats.

Tuesday, April 1st

Last night, in an attempt to protect the fragile apricot buds from last night’s frost, we set up a sprinkler system to run all night and keep the trees wet. We woke up to this terrifying (but cinematic) sight:

Terrified that our plan had backfired, and we’d completely frozen the apricot buds, we did some research and learned that water freezing on the branches actually protects them from extreme cold, because water releases energy when it freezes that keeps the plants warm. Our apricots survived the night, and have since burst into glorious bloom!

It pains me to report that this year’s only April Fools Day prank on the farm was a massive failure. Everyone conspired to steal a pair of Eric’s socks and wear them around all day. All seven of us were wearing Eric’s socks, morning to night! But, tragically, he never noticed. “I don’t pay attention to other people’s feet”.

In honor of Daniella’s visit, Patricia made a ZA-themed Jeopardy that we all played together at night. The final Jeopardy: how many spoons did Patricia unload from the clean dishwasher that morning? If you have an idea how many spoons we use in a day, write in with your best guesses. (Hint: don’t underestimate us!! I lowballed and it was a fatal error).

Wednesday, April 2nd

Last week, we planted 538 trees between the high tunnel and the east shelter belt, in what will become ZA’s silvopasture in future years. A silvopasture is a kind of agroforestry system that integrates trees and grazing livestock (cows, in our case), creating an ecosystem that benefits both the animals and the land.

Our silvopasture will be full of apples, persimmons, black locust, honey locust, birch, and basswood for the cows to munch on as they lounge in the shade. It’s magical to imagine what this pasture will look like in ten, twenty, a hundred years as we plant our tiny seedlings, most of which are under a foot tall. Tree planting is visionary, political, world-building!

Today, we continued to plant the last stragglers from last week’s tree planting extravaganza. Because we had too many trees to fit them all in the silvopasture, we now have birches along the ATR fence, black locusts along the pasture fence, redbud, oak, and birch in front of the house, and 38 cedars that needed to find a new loving home. As soon as the cedars arrived, we realized that they would endanger our apples by carrying cedar-apple rust, a fungi that survives by jumping between plants in the Cupressaceae family (cedars) and the Rosaceae family (apples). Luckily, David Miller from Rock Creek Farm was excited to take them off our hands.

Thursday, April 3rd

I’ve been spending all week in the basement, trying to get our mushrooms tents set up for the season while problem-solving the regular basement flooding that’s been plaguing us the last several weeks.

Spending too long in the basement, especially with flood waters rising around you every few hours, is bound to make a person existential. Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” will give you a sense of what I was feeling.

I’m told that some of our first direct seeding of the season — rainbow carrots and radishes that will be some of our earliest harvests in late May — happened today, but I was too far underground to say for sure.

Friday, April 4th

With Acacia’s help, we finally got the mushroom tent setup ready to go — and emerged from the basement victorious!

Anya (from the fall cohort) arrived for a visit, bearing her trusty flute, and jumped right into tree mulching. After our massive tree-planting push these last two weeks, we’re now in a race against the deer to get all 538 trees mulched and enclosed in trubes (tree tubes) that will protect them from becoming deer snacks. Acacia, Daniella, Margalit, Anya and Gavi did a big mulching push today while Patricia and I inoculated mushrooms — hoping to start harvesting mushrooms in the next few weeks! As always, the trees need more care than there are hours in the day, and we have to prioritize the most urgent tasks to keep the seedlings alive.

Facetiming Ella and Luisa in the evening reunited the whole fall cohort, just in time for fall cohort reunion Shabbat dinner! Reunion Shabbat featured a singalong of everyone’s favorite songs from the fall, with Eric on guitar and Anya on flute. Eric and Anya’s rendition of Autumn Blues left nary a dry eye in the house.

Saturday, April 5th

One of the best things about Leo and Jam: they love to come for long walks with us on weekends. One of the worst things about Leo and Jam: they have terrible senses of direction and we’re fairly confident they couldn’t make their way back on their own if their lives depended on it, so our recent walks have entailed a lot of… herding cats. Eric, their dutiful cat mother, hung back with the cats on a chilly and glorious walk out to the bald eagle nest a few miles away.

Sunday, April 6

A quiet weekend day — lots of computer tasks (taxes 😨), laundry, and getting ready for the week ahead. Margalit spent the day deep-cleaning the kitchen in preparation for Pesach and it is gleaming! I can’t remember the last time the kitchen was this crumb-free.

We invited Angelina and Chris from Sugar Creek Trading Company, a fresh food market and medicinal plant pharmacy in Watseka, over for dinner — our first of planned monthly community dinners where we invite local friends over for dinner and community-building. We had such a lovely time together over tomato soup and cornbread, learning more about their rom-com-worthy couple origin story, their journey to starting Sugar Creek, and what it’s like to start a business while raising a young child (in a word: hard). It really felt like we’d deepened our friendship by the end of the night. Angelina and Chris are so excited to buy local produce and support our work, and we could not be more excited about Sugar Creek’s vision for local food in Watseka. Transforming how we grow food isn’t enough — we also need to be building new distribution models, so that fresh produce is available and affordable in the communities where it is grown. And Sugar Creek hopes to do exactly that.