Week 5

Hi Everyone! 

I'm looking forward to Devin & Dylan's presentation on economics, agriculture, and climate change tomorrow evening. Since farming is so utterly dependent on climate and weather, climate change is definitely something farmers are worried about. Unfortunately, our current economic system doesn't do a great job of promoting practices that will help agriculture adjust to climate shifts (and as you learned last week, agriculture is in fact a big contributor to climate instability). There are certainly some good initiatives aimed at increasing the resiliency of our food system, though, so I hope we'll get a chance to talk about those. Here's a video that profiles one dairy farm that is utilizing practices to make it more resilient to uncertain and severe weather patterns. It addition, it contains a diagram of the sort of drain tiles that I described that run through my farm and that Chelsea was asking for a better explanation of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1FdF2RD2Ik&list=PLcWFNNhgxVSxwms1ovyKnFkn2fVZm2GWJ&index=3.

The weather this week calls for 50% chance of rain on both Tuesday and Wednesday, so that will influence what we're able to do on the farm. What I'd like to do this week is to have you help us prep some additional beds and transplant seedlings into the ground, but the weather may not cooperate with that plan. If it is raining, I may have our Tuesday group work inside the hoophouse and take the Wednesday group up to Family Farm and Home for a field trip.

It is really important that you harden off transplants before planting them outside, otherwise you may kill the little seedlings that you've nurtured so diligently. We do that inside our hoophouse, but here's a two-minute video that describes the process you would go through if you didn't have a hoophouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhDnVK25pGY. 

The rain this coming week should help the seeds that you planted last week to germinate, however, it is important that you monitor your gardens to make sure that they are staying moist in the event that we don't get regular rains. 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.

And for a little inspiration while you wait for your seeds to germinate, here's a quotation from Henry David Thoreau: "I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."