Week 3 Update - Young Farmers

Highlights from last Friday’s class:

• We spotted the first wine cups of the season!

• Our farm chore assignment this week was caring for the chickens. We have some feisty roosters, so we needed to stay on our toes as we fed and watered the flock, and gathered eggs.

• We have 40 new baby chicks - all living in our converted chicken tractor. Chicks can’t regulate their body temperature so we have to keep the brooder at a toasty 91-95 degrees until their feathers form.

• We began our study of earthworms this week and learned some cool facts, such as:

  • Worms cannot survive if cut in half. 

  • Worms breathe through their skin.

  • When frightened, they excrete a yellow liquid through their skin that tastes bitter so that birds do not want to eat them. 

  • Worms have 5 hearts

  • Worms can eat their weight every day and poop out worm castings, some of the best fertilizer for farms and gardens.

• The presence of worms in your soil is an indicator of a healthy garden and is a gauge of organic matter in the soil, so we did a population study where we dug down a cubic foot in one of our row beds and counted the worms we found. Ideally, we should see 10 or more worms per cubic foot. Surprisingly, we only found 1 worm out of 10 samples! The remedy is to add more organic matter, so we added rich compost before planting tomatoes.

• We played a new game called Nutty Squirrels where students pair off as a mama and baby squirrel (which is blindfolded.) The mother has to guide the baby to find “nuts” (rolled up bandana balls) non-verbally by making sounds or tapping their back. Once the baby finds the “nut” it can try to throw it at another team to get them out. We had a great discussion afterwards about trust and vulnerability. They all agreed that we should play it again next week.

See y’all soon!

Ms. Bridget