Angel's Farm Reflection 16

Angel Arias                            Silk Tree Farm                          5/16/13

In the morning we started with some land-developing, since Cathy wanted to open up the front yard to planting. What that meant was that, of course, we had to prepare the land to be planted on since it was her front yard. You can’t really just plant things without preparation, so we were doing a bit of development on two large squares of land that had been previously rota-tilled. To start you dig out indents all around the square, the idea is to create a sort of trench or decline, so that the rest of it almost looks like a raised bed. You throw the dirt you dig out from the sides into the middle of the square, and you continue to do that all around it. There was a tree we had to kind of work around though, so it may have been considered a little less than a perfect square, but it wasn’t a huge complication and was easily worked around. Once you’re done digging out all sides, you then grab a rake and smooth out the dirt evenly among the surface of the square, so that you don’t have haphazard humps of dirt lying around. Smoothing it out (Like a lot of the process) was pretty arduous especially since there were a lot of grass clumps around, throwing off the balance a bit so they had to be moved. I also developed a habit while doing this to flip over the rake to its smoother side, since I felt like a lot of the time I was raking I was pulling up more earth to smooth out, whereas by doing that I got a smoother spread. Or at least that is what it felt like, as there are different methods to be raking and smoothing out the land. After some time of smoothing it all out, I felt like it was sufficient enough and before long we were crouched out over the land planting it. There was some of sort of framework and pattern for what was going to be planted; it was kind of a circle that had rows of plants coming outwards from it. We planted kale, considered planting tomatoes, planted Swiss Shard as well (In alternating pattern) on both squares. After that we had to water them, as watering plants right after you plant them can be pretty important for them. We had lunch then, and right after that we went outside to start removing the sheets of fabric from the plants. The fabric covers were there to kind of secure them while they were developing. I believe it was also beneficial in that pests were less likely to disturb them, and really it just preserved them while they established. We collaboratively removed each sheet and collaboratively folded each sheet, as, for just being covers, were still pretty large. There were several areas on the farm in which covers were used, and thus several areas on the farm where covers needed to be removed. A bit of a side note; something of particular interest to me was how the potatoes were going to grow, and maybe it is simply because I haven’t really seen it but I was really looking forward to seeing them grow exponentially. I mention that because they were starting, which I thought was cool to see. In a time that was not very long, we’d already folded all of the sheets, and by the time we’d gotten back inside, it was time for me to get ready to leave.