Week 7, Fall 2023
Hello everyone, it’s Claire Ivey and Martina tag teaming this week's farm journal again! This week seemed to fly by so fast. We are FINALLY seeing the fall colors we have been craving for weeks. The beauty of the trees changing and the colder temperature, along with harvesting season winding down, has made time pass easily.
Martina here, and I’m so excited to tell you about our Mid-October Mushroom and Contra Dance event! Sunday morning was a little chilly, a little drizzly, and a little sleepy, but so peaceful and cozy. In the morning, we split up between a tincture making workshop and a foraging woods walk. It’s crazy how many mushrooms you can find when you’re keeping an eye out for them! We found a huge variety, from teeny tiny mushrooms with cute little caps growing out of the ground, to huge shelf mushrooms growing on the base of trees. Over at the tincture station, we learned about the triple extraction method to get as many nutrients and compounds out of a mushroom: cold water extraction, alcohol extraction, and hot water extraction. In the afternoon, we showed the different steps of inoculation and people got to make oyster mushroom grow kits to bring home! Inoculation begins by chopping up straw with the lawnmower; more surface area and smaller pieces makes it easier for the mycelium to fully colonize. Next, we soak the straw in water made more alkaline (basic) with limestone. This helps kill off bacteria or other organisms that may compete with our oyster mushrooms. The final step is taking the soaked (and dried) straw and alternating it with layers of grain spawn in a bucket (grain spawn is whole grains covered in mushroom mycelium networks). Wait a few weeks, and you have mushrooms popping out of the bucket! The last (but definitely not least) activity of the day was contra dancing. For those who are unfamiliar with contra dancing (as many of us were before Sunday), it’s similar to square dancing; it’s a social dance, where you cycle through different partners and groups of four with repeating dance moves. We had an AMAZING live folk band, Baba Yaga Stew, which I highly recommend you give a listen to. We also had an amazing caller, who taught us the dances and guided us through the moves with verbal commands. We danced for nearly three hours, and I would have loved even more; I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for future contra dancing opportunities.
That’s all from me this week!
-Martina
Claire here to tell you about our week!
On Monday we started with harvesting tomatoes, green beans, eggplants, shishito peppers, and root vegetables. We did our usual walk-throughs of all the gardens to see what we could offer for market, we covered up the sweet peppers so they didn’t get too cold, and then soaked straw to prepare for Tuesday’s mushroom inoculation.
On Tuesday, we packed all of the produce we were sending to market and bid it farewell, then Amy went and dropped it off to be distributed. We put compost on our sad empty squash beds across the road to give it some life, turned the compost, did a mushroom inoculation, and started some tomato seed saving! I also packed up a ton of samples to send to the lab at Yale that we took last week. They all needed new bags since so many had holes in them so it was a big undertaking, but it all got done! (except for the smaller bags…)
On Wednesday we harvested tomatoes, kousa squash, eggplants, bell peppers, and shishito peppers. I then went to the food pantry in the morning and brought with me a ton of butternut and spaghetti squash, some green beans, sweet peppers, purple cabbage, zucchinis, potatoes, carrots, and green tomatoes. Going to the food pantry is one of my personal favorite weekly activities. Being able to interact with our local community and share the things we grow is a really special feeling that I wish everyone could experience! Back on the farm, another mushroom inoculation was done (the last one of the season!), CP updated our farmers market sales log, Sophie worked on our BOOST presentation (which I’ll talk more about later), and I unpacked our new power washer since our old one sadly stopped working a few weeks ago.
On Thursday I finished packing up all the smaller samples and sent 7 boxes off to the lab! We also transplanted a lot of seedlings that were brought to us by Eric over the weekend and made sure they were nice and happy with a whole bunch of water. A HUGE slay to CP, Martina, Acacia, and Margalit who started building our high tunnel! I almost can’t remember taking it down all those months ago, it was a cold, windy, rainy day and oddly enough so was Thursday - nature wanted us to be reminded that all things are cyclical. They got a whole 4 beams up which is amazing (4 doesn’t sound like a lot but there are only like 15 in total and they are huge and weigh a million pounds, trust me it’s a big deal). Our tomatoes are going to be able to be transplanted into the high tunnel area next year much earlier than we were able to get them in the ground this year and they will be so happy to collect all that nice greenhouse warmth.
Today (Friday), we started with our last tomato harvest of the season. Since it’s going to continue from here on out to just get colder, we are not going to keep covering all the plants every night since it’s so much work, hence us harvesting all we can today before the plants inevitably start to wither and die, #sad. There sas also been a lot of transplanting of peppers from various gardens around the farm into the greenhouse for the colder months so we can still continue eating them. The rest of the day will be filled with a mushroom tent clean, thinking about frost protection strategies for a few different plants, putting paw paw seeds in tall pots with peat moss to cold stratify them over the winter, labeling some tomato seeds, and we can only hope and pray that it just might be a bean day- the best kind of day where we get to take the dry beans from our three sisters bed and open them up which is the most satisfying thing on the planet.
About the event I mentioned earlier:
BOOST is an event that showcases emerging midwestern entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to promote sustainability and climate action. After all the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas during the event, the audience votes on their favorite, and the winners are awarded $5,000! We won the event back in 2020, but as part of Delta Institute’s 25th anniversary, we were selected as one of four past winners to present our work once again. The award will be decided at the virtual event on October 24th. Anyone can register for the event and vote for Zumwalt Acres! We would greatly appreciate your support! Here is the link to register, The deadline to register is Monday October 23rd: https://delta-institute.org/boost-zumwalt-acres-discount/
That’s all from us this week!
Until next time,
-Claire
