Spring Recap - Young Farmers
Here are a few highlights from this busy spring semester. Be sure to look this over with your student and have them share about their experience. They soaked up a ton and have learned so much about growing their own food, local plant foraging and identification, and caring for chickens and bees. Hopefully they’ll put their new knowledge and skills to good use for you and your family!
Week 4 | Apr 15: Continuing plant family study, lesson on chicken raising, started meal worm raising project, meeting the baby chicks, “nutty squirrels” game. Over the course of the semester, they mastered the identification of 8 plant families: mint, aster, parsley, mallow, nightshade, pea, lily, and grass, which translates to over 45,000 plants worldwide!
Week 5 | Apr 22: Wildflower observation, spring weeding, making homemade organic fertilizer aka “swamp water”, planting sweet potatoes from our slips started last month , playing nutty squirrels (again - they can’t get enough!)
week 6 | apr 29: Helping clean up and replant the herb beds by the tasting room. Honeybee lesson - cleaning up old beehives, tasting honey from our bees. Fertilizing plants with our “swamp water” made the previous week.
week 7 | May 6: Hunting for squash bug eggs, building a simple (but effective) solar wax melter for saving the wax from our hive cleanup, playing outdoor games in the shade (another hot day!)
week 8 | Wildflower seed saving, garlic harvest and braiding, cucumber seed starting, visiting the beehives (sorry no pictures!)
week 9 | May 20: More garlic braiding, beginning our bioassay experiment to test the presence of persistent herbicides (Grazon) in hay and cow manure. This stuff can be catastrophic for people wanting to grow organically, but bring mulch and manure from other locations and garden stores. Grazon doesn’t kill grass and it passes through the cows into their manure. It can persist for many years and can literally destroy your garden beds. We planted bean seeds and watered them with 3 different solutions :1) cow manure from the cows next door, 2) hay fed to the cows, 3) water as a control.
week 10 | May 27: Observing results of experiment: all pots look identical. Beans growing well (so far). Conclusion: no herbicides in the current batch of hay or manure, but we will continue to be watchful of all inputs coming on the the farm. End of semester Salsa Party! Making homemade pico de gallo and pressed corn tortillas from organic masa. A perfect ending to an awesome semester.
I loved working with this class - every student was focused and inquisitive throughout every lesson, and I learned just as much from them as they did from me. They worked and played together as a community, demonstrating much empathy and patience for one another. Have a wonderful summer - we look forward to seeing you back in the fall.
Ms. Bridget