Week 8, Spring 2023

Hi friends! Claire, here. 

Happy Beltane!

Beltane is a pagan holiday also known as May Day. It is celebrated by honoring nature and recognizing the power of life and the greening of spring. We had big plans to make flower crowns and a maypole to dance around, and even make traditional honey cakes to go along with the celebration,but unfortunately the weather wasn’t working for us today.  The temperature dropped and the wind and rain picked up.

Last week the weather, though still brisk, was much better for planting and soil sampling! On monday, we began taking the pH of the soil samples we’ve been collecting to learn more about how the soil amendment we use, basalt, is impacting the mineral and carbon content of the soil. We also remained on our long journey of mulching the strawberry beds and trying to suppress the might grass roots that grow beneath the beds. On Tuesday, we did even more pH measurements in our soil samples and finally got to work on fixing all of our tree tubes that had been damaged during the winter. All of the trees we have planted over the past two years are in white tubes in order to protect them from hungry deer and mighty wind, but after a long winter, they definitely need some TLC, which we are very willing to provide. We were able to seed lavender, catnip, dill, chamomile, and mint in one part of our bayit (house in hebrew) beds and also reaped our first mushroom harvest—weighing in at around 5 pounds. We were so excited to finally get some to our local market. On Wednesday, we had a wonderful guest! Forest Bruce (Ojibwe), a PhD student in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, was able to join us in person after years teaching our community only on Zoom. He led us through some activities and shared an Indigenous history of the land we steward with us. He also shared his own background with Midwestern agriculture as an Indigenous person who grew up in Minnesota and moved to Chicago in adulthood. We gave him a tour of our farm and then headed into the woods for a walk and to forage  ramps and wild garlic to send home with him. On Thursday and Friday, we had a huge push for weeding some overgrown beds and getting seedlings transplanted into the ground. We got lots into the ground including celery, cabbage, lettuce, kohlrabi, and arugula. On Friday we also laid out an area of one hectare to spread basalt on for our field trials, so we had to go out there and plant flags at each corner so the basalt spreaders will know where to put all the basalt when it arrives! A 14 pound baby of mushrooms was also harvested Thursday night- mazeltov! What to do with all these mushrooms?

We had a restful shabbat dinner on Friday night and a restful weekend of being together. Now we are excited to move into a new week and get lots done and (hopefully) see some sunny days :)

See you next time,

Claire