Week 1, Summer 2023
Hello all, Claire here- and welcome to the summer season! It’s finally here!
It feels like we’ve been waiting and planning forever, and on monday, a new cohort arrived! (partially), let’s introduce them!
We have Nadav, who is a San Diegan with zero farming experience who's in love with mushrooms. He spent this last year traveling to communities to find friends (mostly Granola Jews) and is stoked to settle down on ZA for a bit to get in touch with the soil. Favorite hobbies include tie-dying, finding chaos in the world, and quiet introspection.
We have Malia, who is a rising senior at Brandeis University in the Environmental Studies Department. In her free time, Malia enjoys dancing hip pop, diy up-cycling projects, reading sci-fi fantasy books, and anything Harry Potter!
We have Zoe, who is from Massachusetts, and they are currently a rising junior at Oberlin, studying Creative Writing. They love reading in the grass, eating strawberries, baking, and writing short stories. Zoe is so excited to be part of the ZA community!
We have Miriam, who was born and raised in Lincoln, a town in the greater Boston area. She is a rising junior at Yale studying the history of science, medicine, and public health focusing on environmental public health and birthing care. She hopes to become a midwife and continue farming many tomatoes throughout life.
And then we have our returning folks:
Daniel, who is a rising junior at Brandeis where he majors in environmental and American studies. He is so excited to return for his second summer at ZA, stewarding the land and building community!
Acacia, nitrogen fixation enthusiast from the driftless region of Wisconsin, was here all spring and is also staying on into the summer season. She’s excited to be continuing into this next season and has been enjoying welcoming in all the wonderful new souls joining the ZA community!
And myself (Claire), I graduated last year from UCSC and will be working with Yale this summer on the ZA basalt research. I’m excited to be here in a season of such abundance!
The week has been so much fun! On Monday morning before the new cohort arrived, some of us harvested some daikon radishes and some bok choy in the morning, then a lovely new group of apprentices rolled in, Nadav, Malia, and Miriam, and we did some introductions over a yummy lunch. After that we did a house and farm tour and got everyone acclimated into the new space.
On Tuesday we started by watering all the various areas that need it everyday, and making sure that everyone felt comfortable with where things are. We spent some good time outside transplanting sweet potatoes and getting a straw soak going. We also introduced the new folks to our research and our mushroom production. At the end of the day we added another new apprentice, as Zoe arrived and moved in.
On Wednesday we started the day with a mushroom clean up and inoculation! We set up teams of a few people and some worked on cleaning out old buckets of mushroom substrate and mycelium that was no longer fruiting, people cleaning the tents that we put the mushrooms in, and people inoculating new mushrooms that will be ready in a few weeks! Then we went over a lot of things to orient the new cohort including work structure, horticulture, and an introduction to the organization.
On Tuesday we planted some chickpeas, kale, okra, and more herbs. Then we went into a whole bunch of orientation stuff in the afternoon and talked about organizational financials and logistical things.
Today we had a HUGE push to get all of our tomatoes from our greenhouse into the ground. We have over 150 plants and they all need tending! We dug holes for them and placed them inside with some compost and biochar, then gave them a good long water to make them a little less stressed. Transplanting plants into the ground is a stressful process for them, It’s like shifting their world on its axis! So we try to make them as happy as we can by treating them with care and keeping an eye on them for the next week or so. In the afternoon some of us also baled hay which isn’t very difficult or very long, but it is VERY messy. We have to be especially careful because so many people have a sensitivity to hay. I geared up in long sleeves and pants, a heavy duty mask, and safety glasses, and jumped into a cold shower right after I was done.
Now all of us are dead tired, it was a long week and one full of learning and introductions. We are all excited to go into our first shabbat dinner tonight and have a restful weekend. Stay tuned as we have even more newcomers joining us next week!
-Claire
