Week 6, Fall 2023
Hey everyone! It’s Martina again. This week, Claire Ivey and I will be tag teaming the farm journal because we had two different but equally exciting things going on! We had our usual farm functions of harvesting, packing orders, turning beds, and what not but we ALSO had two guests: Marya (who happens to be my cousin) and Sophie Speigel. They came to work out in the soy and corn fields with Claire Ivey and Lexi on the research side of ZA, but more on that later.
Last weekend, we went to the hottest place in town: Watseka Harvest Daze! There were stands selling honey, jams, pumpkins, jewelry, baked goods, and all sorts of goodies. Claire Ivey and Claire Pryor (also known as Claire Squared) took the early shift, and Acacia and I came to switch out in the afternoon. We set up shop right across from a strawberry farmer, who was more than happy to share knowledge about his strawberry operation including some of his most prominent challenges and strategies which definitely gave us a lot to think about.
Like all Mondays, we harvested our summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, peppers, and shishitos, and packaged up our produce for Down at the Farms. Why was this Monday different from all other Mondays? We finally began tackling the strawberry patch! This had been on our list for a few weeks now, but finally got the attention it deserved. Before we started, the strawberry patch was full of grass, clover, lambsquarter, amaranth, and a stray corn stalk. Our first step was to actually forage useful and desirable parts of the weeds! We gathered a basket of clover flowers for tea, as well as dried seed heads of lambsquarter and amaranth to boil like quinoa. Our next step was pulling out the annual grass, especially the fluffy seed heads that could lead to more weeds next year. It was a little overwhelming to start, but the more we pulled, the more strawberry plants were exposed, and the more optimistic we felt.
Remember a few weeks ago when we took a bunch of strawberry trimmings to propagate? Well Tuesday, we finally started transplanting them back into the beds, prioritizing gaps between spots that the strawberries have already really established themselves. Tuesday was also an exciting day because we finally got to harvest the broad beans. For context, in late summer and early fall, we were harvesting the broad beans when they were green and preparing them like string beans or snap peas. The caveat was that they were sooo stringy and fibrous and honestly very unpleasant to eat. Well, it turns out that they’re not supposed to be harvested green; you’re supposed to wait until the seed pods have dried up and turned brown, and you can store the beans as a dry good that lasts months! Learning this was a HUGE game changer. Not to be dramatic, but they were the most beautiful beans I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Apart from strawberry patch and beans, we turned the compost piles, Claire Pryor prepped produce for the food pantry, and Frances and Acacia had an agroforestry meeting.
Wednesday morning, Margalit went to the food pantry for her first time, bringing potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, and more. Thanks to the compost turn, some of the piles doubled in temperature overnight! Before the turn it was 65 degrees, and Wednesday it was 120. This is exciting because the hotter the pile, the faster things decompose, and the pile has to hit 130 degrees to sterilize weed seeds and kill plant pathogens. The saga of the strawberry patch also continued. Before I got to ZA, I put very little thought into annual grass versus perennial grass but turns out the difference is super important! Annual grass produces seeds every year, and it is easy to pull out the whole root clump. Perennial grass though, is very stubborn; they have an expansive root system, and can pop up in a 6 foot radius. Trying to hand pull perennial grass is only a temporary fix, and the main organic solution is long term smothering. Once the big patches of seedy annual grasses were removed, we could see where the perennial grass had a strong hold. In these areas, we put swatches of black plastic which will stay on for one to two years to hopefully eradicate the area from perennial grass. Wednesday was also Operation Clean the Mushroom Tents and Eradicate the Flies from the Basement, which meant checking each bucket for flies, and seriously bleaching both the mushroom buckets and the grow tents. It may have involved fungi, but it definitely wasn’t fun (ba-dum shh).
Thursday was our long awaited field trip to THE Janie’s Mill: an organic grain farm and flour mill that distributes all across the country. We got to see where the grains are stored, ground, and packaged. After the mill tour, we also got a farm tour! We heard about the journey of transitioning from conventional agriculture to organic, saw the huge grain storage tanks, and learned about the rotation between corn, soy, wheat, and cover crop. From a distance, it could be hard to differentiate between a conventional monoculture field and an organic monoculture field, but seeing the soil, and feeling its richness definitely reveals a difference.
Friday’s harvest was a last hurrah for a lot of our crops. The frost meant almost all the winter squash vines were shriveled up, so we harvested ALL the winter squash (we’re talking upwards of 400 pounds) and brought them into the greenhouse to cure. We also pulled out the zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, and sunflowers. You can really see the land slowing down and getting ready to rest for the winter; it’s a little sad to have so much less produce but it’s also so peaceful and a good reminder that rest is natural and necessary!
That’s all from me, but here’s Claire Ivey to give the other half of farm happenings this past week!
Hello everyone, Claire Ivey here! From a research perspective this week was a packed one!
We started on Tuesday by soil sampling across the road where the cows are most of the time, and the cows did in fact make an appearance there on Wednesday while we were out there, but they had little interest in us much to our dismay.
The sampling we are doing right now is for a different project than what we have been doing in the past and therefore has a completely different sampling protocol! As fun as it is to switch things up a bit, it’s also tough to do something different then the way you have been doing it for 7 months. Instead of sampling inside of a 6 meter circle we are now sampling in a grid like fashion within a 6 meter square. For the field across the road there are 4 different sites, all containing points A-T. It’s a little confusing but in total there were 128 samples.
On Tuesday I also went out behind the house and Johnny and I harvested some of the soybeans that had basalt applied to them in the spring! Johnny would harvest a patch of soybeans, then we would weigh it out, and at the end I would take the total area harvested and divide by the weight to get the lb/ sq ft.
On Wednesday we continued sampling across the road and finished up that. On Thursday morning we were presented with a complicated problem: the way we had been labeling bags and putting them into our master spreadsheet was just not working very well, it was getting confusing telling samples apart and we needed to come up with a whole new labeling scheme. So we took the morning and rewrote some of the sample bags and made a new spreadsheet. In the end it wasn’t a ton of work, but it required a lot of thinking since there have already been SO many samples taken at ZA.
On Friday we started sampling a different site next to the house that is part cow pasture and part alfalfa, this will eventually be turned into land for silvopasture next year. We only had two plots in this area so it didn’t take us too long, and we didn’t even get rained on which was a huge plus. The even bigger plus was that the baby cows took a huge liking to Lexi and I and it actually became a bit of a problem when they didn’t want to leave us alone and started taking our sample bags. However, they were so cute so we let their mischief slide.
Such a packed and amazing week! In the next farm journal you can look forward to hearing about our mushroom and contra dancing event! Can’t wait to tell you all about it.
-Martinia and Claire
