Week 9, Summer 2023
Hi everyone! This is Olivia updating you on what we’ve been up to this week! We just got back from a trip to Janey’s Farm and Mill for their field day, where we got a tour of the farm, the mill, picked up some flour, and met a ton of cool people working in organic and restorative ag!
This week we celebrated Tu B’Av, the fifteenth of Av, a celebration of the abundance of love following our reflections on grief with Tisha B’Av last week. We wore white and Nadav, El, and Zoe set up a slip n slide on the lawn, which almost everyone tried - even JR (lol)! As we transition from summer to fall, we’re celebrating not only an abundance of love but an abundance of produce to harvest and enjoy. This week, we harvested even more patty pan and kusa squash, zucchini, and cucumbers - the cucumbers in the high tunnel area look especially awesome! - as well as the first of our okra in Bayit.
We were able to harvest a ton of produce for the Sheldon Food Pantry this week: squash, green beans, lettuce, kale, carrots, beets, turnips, red and green cabbage, and Oyster mushrooms, which folks have told me they particularly enjoy in their omelets. Zoe and Malia headed to the food pantry on Wednesday morning to distribute our produce and spread the word about two of our upcoming events, our Backyard Shindig happening this Sunday(!!!) and our Family Food Fest, happening next weekend. We’ve been eagerly preparing for the Shindig this week, harvesting, finalizing plans, and sending out invitations. We can’t wait to see folks there!
Speaking of folks visiting, we welcomed a couple folks to the farm this week to help out. Allyson came to lend a hand on Tuesday and Wednesday, helping us mulch the eastern shelterbelt, do some heavy weeding, and hanging out with Lev and I while we inoculated some mushrooms! When we head to the farmer’s market hopefully we’ll see Allyson there - she sells beautiful jewelry there almost every week and online. In fact, she helped repair El’s bracelet of hers while she was here! Last night we also welcomed Eric back to the farm! Super excited to get some expert advice on horticulture and trees :)
One of our main projects this week has been mulching the trees in our eastern shelterbelt with hay. We’ve spent many long mornings and afternoons listening to Arca on newly returned JBL - who I think is still mad at Zoe for losing him soooo carelessly - and spreading bales and bales of hay around the bases of all our trees. Daniel and Lev also have been working on pruning our trees and fixing up their trubes and stakes.
We’ve also continued giving a lot of love to our compost piles, turning them once every few days, watering once or twice a week, and temping daily. Burfict is now getting up to 145 degrees regularly!!!! which is so awesome, and hopefully the other piles won’t be close behind. Yesterday they delivered a fresh batch of compost. What is the secret to such delicious and abundant compost? As well as the work of turning, temping, etc that El, Malia, and I have been doing - along with lots of help from Zoe! - we’ve been using comfrey in our compost piles! Comfrey has been very good to us - El used it to make a comfrey tea which I sprayed on the plants on Thursday, and we’ve also used it to fertilize a couple of our newly cleared snap pea beds as we prepare them for the fall season.
As we move into late summer, we’ve been diligently tending to the tomatoes. Zoe and El in particular have spent a lot of time with our tomato plants, trellising them as they grow and pruning them. We are hoping they will be ready very soon! Some other plants we’ve been taking special care of this week are our squash plants, who were previously getting beaten down on all sides by squash beetles and cucumber beetles. But we took the power back and pummeled them with soapy water and duct tape until they surrendered.
A couple final little updates - our silphium are looking much better! They are few but mighty. We also did a deep clean of the greenhouse (thank you so much Lev and Allyson!), some hay baling, and a sunset trip to the Indiana sand dunes last night, which was lovely. Moving into next week hoping for more abundance, more joy, and sweet goodbyes as we start transitioning into the fall season!
Love,
Olivia
