Fletcher Collective Project Overview

Hey everyone, my project for this class is going to be planning and implementing a garden at my home (The Fletcher Collective). As you may have noticed at our last brunch, we have a handful of raised beds that should serve as the bulk of our garden space. I'm going to be partnering with one of my housemates (Ben Brown) in planning and implementing the garden. As of yet we don't know exactly what we are going to plant, but we should have enough space to raise a large variety of crops. We'll be using whatever we already know about sustainable agriculture and my own learning from our class/farm time. I also just noticed that we have an (slightly disheveled) apple tree in our back yard as well. Hopefully we can do something with that.

My learning goals for this project are to get more practice actually working with the earth, and to implement some of the methods we've discussed in class in my own living context. I want to gain a deeper understanding of all the steps involved in the sustainable gardening process from seed to harvest. Planning and raising my own garden at my house should allow me to do that, and also has the added bonus of allowing me to check in on my plants everyday to see how they're doing and study their growth patterns and temperaments.

I'm super excited to get rolling, if any of you guys want to come check out the garden or help at all with it, just let me know. I'm sure w can work out a time.

Thursday, April 11: First Brunch!

For our first class brunch, we were hosted by Max and Hannah at Max's house (the day before their SIP readings, no less. Bravo!) It was a really lovely morning: sitting around the table together chatting with quiche warm in our bellies, safe from the cold rainy weather.

The quiche was delicious and made entirely from scratch. 

We first talked about course logistics, such as the brunch schedule, farm visits, the hoophouse raising at Green Gardens, and independent projects. Everyone offered their reflections on the first two weeks, and we discussed some form of more formal written reflection moving forward. Finally, we covered a number of conceptual issues: from government subsidy policy and the Farm Bill to acquiring (and keeping) farm land; Amy was kind enough to share her own story about the latter piece. Overall, one emergent theme was definitely how hard we're realizing small farmers work to provide healthy fresh produce to their community and care for the land!