Week 5, Fall 2023
Hi everyone! Martina here, giving Claire a little farm journal break this week.
Despite our busy weekend, we got right back into our normal Monday routine, harvesting cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, okra, green beans, and shishito peppers. Right after lunch we packed up a huuuge produce order for Down at the Farms; tomatoes, daikons, and squash galore! Claire P., Margalit, and I did a much needed mushroom tent clean. Can you believe that 4 weeks ago I avoided eating mushrooms at all costs and now am checking for happy mycelium and calling the baby mushrooms cute?
Tuesday, Acacia and Margalit started prepping the tomato and cucumber bed so we can put up the high tunnel (like a greenhouse, but less permanently built) as soon as the tomatoes and cucumbers call it quits. We’ll be sad to say good bye to these summer crops but are so excited about new infrastructure! Yay infrastructure!
We harvested our final 10 pounds of carrots and put the bed to rest with lots of tilling, composting, and mulching. This was no joke in 80 degree weather! We also inoculated and harvested mushrooms per usual. Also…Claire Ivey is finalizing our new Zumwalt Acres merch… get excited!
In the afternoon, we got an in-depth presentation about the rock weathering carbon capture research that’s happening in partnership with Yale to bring in all the new folks here this season. There’s a lot of science and chemistry that goes into this research, but the short form is that ground up basalt (a byproduct of mining) covers the soil of corn and soy fields, interacts with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and, if all goes according to plan, pulls atmospheric carbon into the soil and deposits it in long term reserves such as the sediment of river beds. This research has been going on for years and will continue for years, but has the potential to pull literal tons of carbon out of our atmosphere, combatting climate change.
On Wednesday, we started with our usual harvest (cukes, zuches, squash, tomatoes, okra, shishitos, okra, you know the drill) before making our way to Eureka, IL where we visited Teresa Brockman’s Sunnylane Farm, where fellow apprentice Amy used to work. It was so cool seeing a more mature organic regenerative farm with productive fruit trees and perennial berries; it gives us something to look forward to! We got a ton of helpful advice including how to evict stubborn weeds (we’re looking at you, strawberry patch) and how to save fruits from pests by planting crops that ripen at a different time than pests peak. After our tour, we had a lovely picnic lunch where we are STILL finishing leftovers from Sukkot! On the way back to ZA, we stopped by our local librarian’s pear tree to gather some goodies.
On Thursday, we had a half day to give us a much needed rest since our busy busy Sukkot weekend, which meant a busy morning! You could find us cleaning the mushroom tents, harvesting our first pink oyster mushrooms, tucking the peppers and eggplants in for winter with some water and light permeable row cover, making a long term agroforestry plan (thank you Acacia and Frances), and finishing up a grant application (huge shoutout to Sophie, Gavi, Acacia, and Lexi). To wrap up our half day, Claire P. and Margalit led a roundtable discussion about the Characteristics of White Supremacy culture and how it manifests at ZA. Some things we thought about were: How do we counteract a sense of urgency that can force people to put their needs on the back burner when a farm is such a busy work place where environmental factors dictate our timelines and deadlines? How does living in an intentional community both counteract the pitfalls of individualism and make us less comfortable voicing opinions that go against group consensus? How do we maintain democratic and transparent decision making without having “too many cooks in the kitchen” for every issue? Is the disorganization of the google drive a symptom of power hoarding? Or is the disorganization a side effect of trying to make all information available for all to see? As you can see, there is so much to think about and this will definitely be a continuing conversation.
In the afternoon, Gavi led Claire Pryor, Acacia, Margalit, and Sophie in an improv dance exercise in the front yard. We love getting more people moving their bodies, connecting with the world around them and each other through dance, and expanding our idea of who is and isn’t a dancer. Right after dancing, they ALSO went to a yoga class in Watseka. In the evening, we helped usher in fall and the Halloween season by watching Beetlejuice during dinner and eating pear crisp made from our local pears.
Friday! Yes we harvest cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, shishitos, and okra every Friday, but it's not every Friday that we harvest 110 pounds of just butternut squash! And it’s not everyday that Acacia carries all 110 pounds all at once with one hand! (Okay, maybe that last part was a stretch). We ate one last lunch in the Sukkah which included a late season watermelon and one of our final cucumber salads; crazy to think that just two weeks ago we were up to our ears in cucumbers.
With the harvest season upon us, Claire I. has been working relentlessly all week creating a plan to collect yield data for the soy and corn fields covered in basalt, coordinating with JR, Johnny, and Mark, updating GPS coordinates, and so much more that is above my head.
In case you’re already itching for next week’s happenings, you can expect updates from Watseka Harvest Daze where we’ll have a produce stand this Saturday, and two special guests and lots of soil sampling.
That’s all from me!
Martina :)