August 8th-12th

Monday

We started the week with a general clean up; sometimes we forget about aesthetics when we’re working on new projects every week.

We stapled visitor information signs to posts:

Here are new and beautiful babies!:

Beans are reaching for the sky:

Paula’s prepared for rain or shine:

We also discovered that several pest problems have decimated our carrots, beans, and squash.

The new baby bunnies and their momma mercilessly devoured the beans. Here you can see the healthy beans versus the bitten down ones:

Japanese Beetles have also done a number on the bean leaves. Paula and I have been squashing them any chance we get. Here are the healthy leaves versus the hole-y ones:

The squash has a different kind of problem: BACTERIAL WILT. I’m employing the caps lock because the wilt is extremely contagious, and has destroyed an entire line of our squash L. The striped cucumber beetle is a carrier of bacterial wilt, and since they’re so darn hard to catch they’ve done a number on our squash plants.

Healthy versus sick:

The carrots, like our beans, were victims of those wascally wabbits:

To lift our spirits, Paula and I ventured to make kale chips! We harvested some of our beautiful Red Russian kale:

In the kitchen, we ripped up the kale leaves into chip-sized pieces (definitely not chip shaped)

After tossing these pieces in olive oil, we salted the kale and laid it out on baking sheets.

We baked the leaves at 325° F for about 5 minutes (some batches took up to 8 minutes) and viola! Cripsy, salty, delicious, healthy kale chips!!

The roses we planted are blooming and the pumpkins we seeded rather late are popping up:

On Market Day, Paula and I harvested a whopping amount of Yellow Straight Summer Squash, weighed it, and sold it under Mount Holyoke’s name on Thursday.

We also successfully sold our pickles!!!:

Tim and Professor Lipman teamed up to play and fun and talented Farmers Market gig Thursday afternoon:

Friday began the most eventful, tiresome, and exciting weekend of the summer: NOFA!

Pictured above is the wheelbarrow race that took place on the lawn by the pond. It was one of many fun and farm-y events by the tents that also held demonstrations, vendors, and people advertising everything from beekeeping services to tractor insurance.

Some homemade brooms caught our eye:

Here I am judging various tomatoes and peppers grown by attendees of the conference:

Paula and I got to know some animal friends as well:

We went to so many workshops our heads spun, but one of our favorites was a tour of UMASS Amherst’s Permaculture Garden. It is new as of this year, the sheet mulching having been done last fall and things have only grown there this summer. The great kids who tend to it (there are a lot of them!) are selling everything to dining services. Here they’re showing us how to make compost tea:

Which we all helped feed their beets with:

At another workshop we learned about some medicinal herbs that you can pick and use in your own backyard (or on UMASS’s campus, in our case). Here I am holding some yellow dock:

The other workshops we attended included “Traditional Diets vs. The American Diet”, “Cultivating Community with Permaculture”, “Transitioning Farms to Four Season Harvesting”, and “Synthetic Biology: The Frontier Beyond GMOs”. We ended the weekend with a tour of the Montview Neighborhood Farm in Northampton, a permaculture garden in the city:

We had a crazy busy week, hope you guys enjoyed reading up about it!

Ingrid

August 1-5

Hey everybody! Paula here! I don’t know about you, but Ingrid and I are amazed (and slightly depressed) that it is August already!

We have been busy all week doing an assortment of projects, including harvesting our second batch of Zephyr Summer Squash and first of Alibi pickling cucumbers, cooking and going on two farm tours. And of course weeding and chasing rabbits. Plus we have lovely watermelons!

Monday

So today we had some fun in the morning harvesting Winterbor and Red Russian kale for Dining Services. We ended up harvesting 18.5 pounds and we got to see a little behind the scenes of Dining Services when we helped carry the kale to freezer storage.

So remember when we filled Ingrid's car with all the seedling starts that we grew in the greenhouse to transplant to our garden? In the car trunk we had the kale seedlings and now check out the harvest from this week of kale! Neat!

Then we also started building a bamboo arch to go over the garden entrance. We used an old trellis from a few summers ago as our roof and then made three sets of frames with two side poles tied together with another across. We also got our scale today, so now we can weigh things for the Experimental Plots!

We spent a lot of time lashing the poles together to make the frame for the roof. When it was finished, it looked beautiful! We have some Morning Glory seeds and will buy some vine plants.

We also picked cucumbers that had gone crazy in our No-Till plot because we wanted to try pickling them. Here is the video from our first cucumber harvest:

As a test, we made two jars of pickles which looked pretty good, but we'll try more tomorrow!

Tuesday

We began by harvesting our second batch of Zephyr Summer Squash , which amounted to 20 pounds! This we dutifully brought over to Dining Services, which they were excited about because they could bread them and preserve them sliced. Then we finished our arch at the entrance, so the garden looks wonderfully tiki!

Pickling time! Ingrid and I have had this idea from the beginning to pickle the cucumbers, but we were amazed by how big they had grown. We decided to slice them and after buying some ingredients like vinegar, mustard seed, turmeric, celery seed and dill, we set too work in the kitchen.

Since this was our first time making pickles and we were not experienced making the long-lasting kind, we decided to make a quicker version which lasts about two months. We had plans to sell some in jars at the Farmer’s Market, but we’ll see how they turn out. It was a great way to take advantage of the stormy day.

Check out our video about the cooking process:

The sound was a bit off, so here is the transcription:

Ingrid: Today we’re pickling Alibi pickling cucumbers. We let them grow a little big, but that’s okay because we’ve been cutting them in half into little mini pickles in these jars. We made some yesterday, but now we’re making them on a bigger scale.

Paula: Hello fellow gardeners, continuing with the pickling process we’ve got in here simmering vinegar, mustard seed, (celery seed) dill and turmeric and we’re about to pour this right into all the jar of the cucumbers which are pre-sliced and ready to be made into pickles. So we’re really excited and we hope you try our recipe we’re putting on the blog.

This recipe was adapted from "The City Homesteader" by Scott Meyer.

For 6 pint-size jars:

1 1/2 cups distilled white vinegar

1/2 cup fresh dill

1 1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp each of mustard seed, celery seed, kosher salt and turmeric

6 cups sliced cukes in thin/medium sized slices

Directions:

1. Bring vinegar to simmer and add all the ingredients, letting simmer and stirring often until sugar and salt dissolve.

2. The liquid (brine) should turn a pale green. Pour liquid in jars of pre-sliced jars of cucumbers until slices submerged.

3. Let cool for two hours on countertop uncovered and then refrigerate with caps tightly sealed. Ready in one week and lasts up to two months. Enjoy!

In the afternoon, we went to visit Hampshire Farm!

It was interesting to see how college could have such a large farm with animals, flowers, and many fields of vegetables, greenhouses and even heirlooms. Here is the llama that guards the sheep and goats. Saying he is very alert would be a horrible understatement (think evil toothy grin).

The tomatoes looked very impressive and they even had Striped Germans like we do!

Eggplant, so jealousssss!

They use the Florida weave too!

Amazed by the blue sky and stretches of perfectly straight neat rows, we walked the fields, pointing out fruiting vegetables as we went. I thought I would feel intimidated about our small garden in comparison to such a large operation, but instead I was proud of our accomplishments and hard work. Just think about how our care had nurtured some rye cover crop to bring so many vegetables and life to our little garden! <--Paula's sappy inner garden geek side emerges. :O

Wednesday

Today was a day full of errands!

My research plot is thriving so much that it has gained some unwanted attention. The rabbits were helping themselves to my Three Sisters Garden research, especially nibbling the pole beans. We drove out to buy some tall netting so I could make a fence and then also went to look from some climbing plants for our new bamboo entrance. We found a nice climbing rose, and got a special deal with one free, so we also got a bush to decorate the garden.

We planted the bush and filmed a little interview about it and the bamboo arch, which we will put up as part of a clip series at the end of the internship.

Thursday

We headed to the Farmers’ Market, but this week we were not going to set up our stand because we went to a New Entry Farm Tour in Dracut, MA. It was a two hour car ride and we got lost a couple times, but we were optimistic and enjoyed the rural scenery while we were trying to get back on track.

We got to the New Entry field just in time for a tour in the vegetable rows and greenhouse. The heat source for the greenhouse was pretty interesting. When the oil prices are high they use a corn stove, which slowly burns the kernels for field. And they switch to their gas stove when the corn prices rise.

At the end of the tour, we went in groups on school buses to visit some of the New Entry farms. They used an interesting trellising system for their climbing plants. Instead of our a-frames that we weave our plants through, they tie string to the plants and allow the tendrils to climb a single pole.

New Entry is an organization that supports individuals or families who want to try small-scalesustainable farming in Massachusetts. Participants come from many countries create CSAs and contribute food to other organizations as well as lend their own cultures to the methods and vegetable varieties in their plots.

Tomatillos!

We toured plots farmed by Zimbabweans, Cambodians and Americans alike. They each had different kind of produce and plot set-ups.

One man who was working with his family on their plot had no real prior experience and shared that he had learned so much about food and sustainability through this program.

Some of them had put down plastic before planting to keep down the plants and others put plastic over the plants to protect them from pests. Each had a story to tell about their struggles, accomplishments or beginning stages. I think their words resonated with us because we had done something so similar. Ingrid and I managed the garden with a independence and leadership guided by our mentors but crafted by our creativity and determination.

Some Thai basil, a spicy pepper variety from Thailand, Green squash from Cambodia.

The Cambodian farmer had planted some beautiful tomatoes just and he offered the group some. Ingrid and I were looking at his bean trellising system which seems pretty natural, with propped sticks in a fort tunnel shape with strings across for support as they climbed.

As a wonderful capstone to our experience, I dragged Ingrid back to the New Entry fields to see the chickens they had which were incredibly adorableeeeeeeee. J

Visit their website at: http://nesfp.nutrition.tufts.edu/index.html It’s sponsored by Tufts University!

Friday

Today was slightly rainy but we were determined to get things going in the plot labeling and visitation signs. So we got some wood pieces to paint into vegetables signs that say “Kale” or “Tomatoes” so it’s clear what we have growing in the Experimental Plots. We also harvested more summer squash for Dining Services from each plot (17 pounds!)

Just to be clear, we are also collecting data whenever we harvest the squash. This done every year for the Ecology course in the fall, except for the first time this year we are harvesting every vegetable that comes out in addition to the students doing this themselves. This is for eggplant, tomato, beans and squash in our six Experimental Plots.

We have to label date, length, plot number and treatment for every squash we harvest, so it’s a bit more work than the average harvest, but it’s awesome because we get to gain data collection experience and work for a course!

Saturday and Sunday I worked on fencing my research plot and it looks great!

Hope you enjoyed this week as much as we did!

Sunny days,

Paula