Duck Run Construction

Week 9 at Harvest of Joy Farm LLC

Weather forecast: Highs in the mid-70s/mid-80s. Tuesday: 60% chance of rain. Wednesday: 30% chance of rain. Thursday: 10% chance of rain. Friday: 40% chance of rain/chance of severe weather. Saturday: 40% chance of rain.

I hope all of you have had a great Memorial Day weekend! Big thanks to Alice and Christine, who came out on Sunday to help shop for next Saturday's Strawberry Party and to work on the duck run. The run looks great and we're hoping that perhaps those of you planning to come out on Wednesday will lend a hand with finishing it up.

I had hoped that we'd have a big planting day tomorrow, however, after looking at the weather forecast, I don't think that's going to be possible with the predicted rain since we've already received enough moisture today to make the ground pretty sticky. After conferring with John and Diane, I think the priority here on the farm tomorrow will be to use the rainy day to clean up my house and the porch in preparation for Saturday's open house.

Since our Monday group already missed their farm day due to Memorial Day, I'm going to propose a much more flexible farm participation schedule for this week instead of holding an "official" class day tomorrow (Tuesday). If any of you really want to help us clean, you are more than welcome to come out tomorrow afternoon. But if you'd rather use that time to catch up on other work so that you can come out later in the week to help with planting, strawberry bed prepartion and/or duck run construction, that's okay too.

You are welcome to come out any time during the day on Wednesday or Friday. Caroline was going to reserve a car for folks coming out on Wednesday afternoon, leaving campus at 1:30. If you want to come out at a different time, let me know and we can reserve other vehicles. It looks like Thursday is actually going to be our best planting day and I'd love to have you here for that, but I don't want you to miss out on the opportunity to visit Elder Fire Farm. If you are planning to go on that visit, please make sure you've let Janelle know!

We will need people here on Friday or early on Saturday to help set up for the party. We will need to set up the tent, table, and chairs on the lawn, as well as tables for food in the porch. We will run through the strawberry planting procedure so that you can help others plant throughout the afternoon. We'll need people to take responsibility for various aspects of the afternoon--everything from helping people park to getting the bonfire going in the evening. If you are planning to come and would be willing to lend a hand with some of these things, would you please let me know as soon as possible? Thanks!

Weeks 7 & 8 Photos

I didn't do a very good job of photo-documenting weeks 7 & 8. Sorry! If anyone has better photos, feel free to share.

The Things We Don't Know

Hey guys,
I found this today. Here I was thinking I was doing a good thing by eating healthy yogurt from a company that gives back. Unfortunately greek yogurt has an environmentally damaging dark side.

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/05/whey-too-much-greek-yogurts-dark-side/

A Week of Groceries

This was forwarded to me this morning and I thought was interesting in light of our comments today about how food connects people within and across cultures: http://fstoppers.com/what-a-week-of-groceries-looks-like-around-the-world

What A Week Of Groceries Looks Like Around The World

It seems as a people, we have a fascination with photographing our food. From Henry’s series of riders, to looking on instagram we cant help but document what we consume. Photographer Peter Menzel started this intriguing series of one weeks of groceries from around the world, taking traditional food photography to a much larger scale.

Mexico

Great Britain

USA

Australia

Germany

Italy

Canada

France

Japan

China

Poland

Kuwait

Mongolia

Turkey

Mali

India

Bhutan

Chad

Ecuador

Guatemala
[Via walltowatch]

Week 8 at Harvest of Joy Farm LLC

Weather forecast: Highs in the 80s, 50-60% chance of rain.

Not long ago you were hearing me talk about all of the problems we were having due to too much rain. Well, now things have swung a bit in the opposite direction as we've got seeds and plants in the ground which could really use a drink. Diane, John, and I have been hauling bucketfuls of water out of the lake to sprinkle on the tomato, broccoli, lettuce, and onion plants we planted last week and I can tell you that that much hand-watering is getting old fast! We don't want to start up the irrigation system until we've got a few more of our lake garden beds planted, since if we soak the unplanted beds, we'll have to halt our planting for a day or two until they dry out again.

I'm happy to have rain in the forecast this week, since nothing can take the place of a good thunderstorm for getting seeds germinated and plants growing. But we've got lots of plants and seeds I'd like to have in the ground before the rains come and so we'll be making a big push to get those in on Monday morning and early afternoon. A generous neighbor donated a heaping truckload of composted horse manure to us over the weekend, so we'll be spreading it on the beds, working it in, laying paper mulch, and planting more tomatoes and our earliest beans. I may also ask some of you to start mulching the plants we've already got in the ground with hay. This will help retain soil moisture so that we don't have to water as often and also protect and feed those soil microbes we keep talking about.

Bring rain gear if you've got it. We'll work outdoors in a light sprinkle if we have to, though a thunderstorm may drive us inside to soil block winter squash.

I finally updated the farm blog with a new post this weekend. If you'd like to check it out, here's a link: Harvest of Joy Farm Spring Slideshow

Fun Facts: Monocots vs Dicots

Last week some of you were noticing that as the squash seeds germinated, the leaves pushing out of the soil had the seed husk still attached. I talked a little bit about seed structure and mentioned briefly that flowering plants are generally classified into two types: monocots and dicots. Their seeds are structured differently and so their germination looks a little different too, as shown in the diagram below.

For an entertaining (and really quite informative) tutorial on the differences between monocots and dicots, check out fourth grader Julia Sherwin's claymation video on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBz1unaMr6I.

The Farm Bill and Organic Agriculture

I received an email today from the National Organic Coalition requesting that I call my senator regarding restoring funding for organic programs in the new farm bill. Included in the email was a link to a pdf which compares the House and Senate versions of the 2012 bill (which  did not pass), along with the farm bill extension. It also details what the NOC would like to see included in the farm bill and why. Perhaps some of you will find it interesting (or at least informative): http://www.nationalorganiccoalition.org/MembersOnly/January%202013%20Meeting/Farm%20Bill%20side-by-side%202013%20FINAL.pdf

The Farm Bill

In between talking about practical stuff like soil improvement, transplanting, pest control, and what-have-you, we've managed to squeeze in some conversations about the larger political, socio-economic, and cultural issues that affect my farm and what we're able to do here. One significant piece of legislation that governs our current food system is informally known as "The Farm Bill." Officially titled "The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act," this bill sets policies for just about everything you can think of that's even remotely connected to our food system, from conservation and rural development to food assistance, agricultural subsidies, and exports.

Congress reviews and renews the farm bill approximately every five years. Our last farm bill was enacted in June of 2008 and was due to expire last September. Despite the usual amount of legislative wrangling, Congress was unable to pass a 2012 Farm Bill before the 2008 bill expired and since then we've been limping along on extensions of the old bill. The debate has resumed this spring, however, and both the House and Senate Agricultural committees will be voting on their versions of what is now the 2013 Farm Bill this coming week.

For an overview of the farm bill and its reenactment process, check out the Congressional Research Service's What is the Farm Bill? The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's website is another place that you can find information on the farm bill and its progress (or lack thereof) through Congress. In particular, there are two acts that activists supporting small, local, and organic agriculture are attempting to galvanize support for right now. They are The Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act of 2013 H.R. 1727 and S.837 (http://sustainableagriculture.net/our-work/beginning-farmer-bill/) and The Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act H.R. 1414 and S. 679 (http://sustainableagriculture.net/our-work/local-food-bill/bill-summary-2/).

Here's a link to the NSAC's blog on all things farm bill: http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog. If you'd like to know more about the farm bill and how it impacts you, ask Caroline! She's spent a significant amount of time researching and thinking about this piece of legislation.

Week 7 at Harvest of Joy Farm LLC

Weather forecast: Monday, sunny, highs in the mid-50s; Tuesday, sunny, highs in the mid-70s

What did you worry about today? I can tell you what's been on the minds of farmers across southwestern Michigan today and what's going to rouse them from bed in the middle of the night tonight. A potential freeze. Earlier in the day, the weather service was predicting temperatures for our area as low as 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Diane, John, and I abandoned our plans for the day to drag big, filmy sheets of row cover fabric out of the shed to drape over our plants in order to protect them from such an extreme drop in temperatures. The wind did not make this an easy task, but we got it done:

I think we've protected our plants as well as we can, but other farmers around the area will be setting their alarm clocks for the middle of the night tonight to check temperatures and turn on wind machines and sprinkler systems if necessary to try to protect their crops from the cold.

Weather will be a factor in what we do on the farm this week as well. If the lake field is dry enough to till tomorrow morning and my Dad can get on it with a tractor and multivator, we'll start making beds down there Monday afternoon with the hope of getting onions, broccoli, lettuce, and early tomatoes planted yet this week. John is also planning to bring grafting supplies with him, so if we can't get on the ground right away, we might spend some time grafting. I'd also like to give you a little time to care for the bed you planted in the hoophouse. And there's always that quackgrass to pull!

Potatoes

After planting potatoes with the Monday group last week, I re-watched the final section of "Botany of Desire," which is all about the potato and human relationships to this plant. If you haven't already seen this film, I want to encourage you to watch at least this final section, which begins an hour and twenty minutes into the film. Besides offering some history of the potato, including its origins in Peru, it provides a variety of perspectives on organic vs conventional agricultural systems, including discussions of diversity, genetic modification, and chemical usage. PBS Video: The Botany of Desire.

Week 6 Photos: Planting Potatoes, Fence-building, Soil-blocking