Week 2, Spring 2023
It’s Claire! Welcome back to the farm journal!
We have just wrapped up our first week of the 2023 spring season, and are bustling through to week 2. Last week was the start of waking up the farm for the season, and for the next couple of weeks we will be doing ample preparation for planting all our lovely crops.
On Sunday we welcomed in our new cohort! We are a small group this season, but we also have some wonderful helping hands coming and going, shoutout to Allison and Grace.
Joining us in this cohort is the ever wonderful Remi who we all know and love; Lexi who has been a guiding hand for a few years now teaching us all about fungi and spiritualism; Claire who is back from the founding cohort in 2020; Acacia, a newcomer originally from Wisconsin who travels often and loves the farm life; and Felix who will be joining us later this week! Our helping hands this season include Allison, who is a local from the area and was with us this fall as well; and Grace, who lives in Chicago and is excited to delve more deeply into our work.
Monday night kicked off the Jewish celebratory holiday of Prium! We took the day to enjoy nature and each others company, it was extra special since we had even more folks from our community join us. Eric came down from Chicago from the Summer 2021 and fall 2021 cohorts; and we had Maranda from the Fall 2021 cohort; and Marya from the Fall 2021 cohort and summer 2022 cohorts (who also stayed a few days for some fun soil sampling). At the end of the night we had a Prium spiel, the traditional silly skit that re-enacts the Purim story, and it was, of course, magical.
After settling in over the weekend, we started our week off strong. On Monday we had conversations about what ZA means to us, collectively and individually, and the many different types of work that we do here. Then we ventured outside to get to know each of the garden beds, research plots, tool sheds, and places where the cats like to adventure. Throughout the week we learned about the soil amendments we use (basalt and biochar), the soil and water sampling procedures which let us know how effectively the soil amendments are capturing atmospheric carbon, our indoor and outdoor mushroom cultivation, seed planning, and so much more!
We love being here with furry friends while nature is waking up from her long slumber— our farm cats, Phoebe and Shlomi/Nooch, are loving all the attention now that more people are around. When they’re not asleep on their heating pads in the shed, they are often taking walks with us in the woods, or following us around as we prepare the garden beds for planting.Our pollinator friends, the honeybees, survived the winter and are looking healthy and active. We can’t wait to become more familiar with all the wonderful workers. It’s also calf season for our neighboring herd! Since we have been here 3 calves have been born and watching them play out in the pasture together could possibly be something I could watch forever.
On Friday, we had a nice full work day with creating soil blocks and cleaning out our many buckets filled with mushroom substrate to get them up and running again. We also had our first Shabbat dinner of this season and had an amazing dinner of split pea soup with sides of squash and rice with a fresh salad made by Grace, and of course two beautiful loaves of challah with dough made by Remi. One loaf was impressively braided by Acacia (who knew you could do a 6 stranded braid?!), and the other one was very very mini braided by Remi.
This week we are really getting into the swing of things with making even more soil blocks in order to plant seeds in them and get them growing. Later we will transplant them into the soil.We are also finishing up ordering seeds and mushroom spawn for the season. We have lots of weeding we need to do, as well as building more fencing, and repairing tree tubes from the rough and windy winter.
Besides work, we are all so excited to get to know each other this season, we all look forward to crafting and movie nights together, and it looks like some pickle tastings as well? We will get back to you on that one. Maybe we can give you an update in next week's farm journal :)
