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.

Angel's Farm Reflection 15

Angel Arias                           Silk Tree Farm                            5/9/13

Today as some may have observed, it was rainy and a bit dreary out today. As a result of that, we opted to stay inside for some time (That time lasting until it got better outside later in the day).  While we were inside we worked on a few things, I’d previously inquired to Cathy about perhaps using her scale to assist in the weighing of the bags of sugar I would be using in my project. She agreed, so I brought sugar and small sealable bags, as well as the information on about how much sugar was in each beverage that I would be using for comparison in my project. For those of you who don’t know, as part of my project I was going to be leading and teaching a food justice lesson of my own at some point in advisory. I decided that I wanted to get an eclectic of trying to facilitate and lead a discussion on the material I would be teaching, to be actually teaching something worthwhile to the students, and to have an interesting activity for the students to participate in. That activity ended up being organized as having bags of sugar with varying amounts of sugar in each bag, then, having bottles of sugar-containing beverages, again in varying amounts. The object of the activity would be for the students to guess what each bag of sugar corresponded to which beverage/soft-drink and to also have a water bottle (as one of the options) and an empty bag with no sugar, strictly for comparison to the other prevalent beverages. The central ideas would to, 1: Show them how much sugar is in these beverages and make them more aware about what they’re guzzling, and 2: To show them that there are certainly better, healthier alternatives that aren’t likely to hurt you. Now due to what I mentioned earlier, we started working on making a stock, as well as preparing a stock for lunch. After I threw in the vegetables for the stock that was being prepared, I started weighing out the sugars according to each beverage in a bag and marking them off. When I started looking for beverages to include, it surprised that Fuze only held twenty grams of sugar. “Wow,” I thought, “I would have guessed that thing would have been one of the higher-concentrated in sugar beverages.” But little did I know. Cathy told me to look for it’s serving size and check to see if it was “ingredients by serving”, and it was, four serving to a bottle, turning the somewhat innocuous 20 into an unsurprising 80. I had to do that for a few other beverages as well, and a few of them ending up being similar cases. While I was weighing the sugar, I’d noticed Cathy slicing up what looked like sheets of fat from vacuum-sealed packages. She explained that this was the fat from her pigs, and that she was going to use her crockpot to render it into lard. When you render something into lard, you have to do it very slowly and meticulously, because you don’t want the fat to cook; that would ruin it. You want it to slowly melt, not to fry. When I was weighing sugar, I started taking over on slicing the fat since Cathy was busy. I tried cutting through it with scissors, but that was difficult. So I sliced most of the way through with a knife, making a cut track, and then cut through it with scissors, which made it much easier. I then tried to slice through the strips to make chunks, and it worked. But Tom came by and suggested that I instead of the strips upright horizontally, and slice it through it through that way, since I would then be slicing through less rough skin and some fat tissue, equalizing it better than doing it one or the other. I did this for a while, until Cathy returned and we had lunch. Then we headed outside with the intent of raking out the goat pen. Alas, after searching around the goat pen we could not discover a single rake. So we spent a while looking for them, and due to this being a recurring thing, we decided to move all the tools to a secured familiar area. After all that business was done and we actually started raking the goat pen, a horn beeped from the front of the house signaling my departure.

Angel's Farm Reflection 14

Angel Arias                             Silk Tree Farm                           5/7/13

This morning we started by doing something that perhaps I would not have expected. Cathy wanted to make some kind of natural fertilizer, but as her schedule is pretty busy she’d rather have something that was more all-purpose, as apparently a lot of fertilizers are plant-specific (I guess that has to do with what certain plants need/require and what would be best for them). She’d found a way to make an all-purpose fertilizer with worms, though I forget what the name for it was or whether or not it had a name at all, I do remember how the process was handled. There were three plastic containers, two of which had holes for drainage; the bottom one lacking these – but having a spigot attached on the front end of it. There is also a brick or other support centered in the lowest container so that the other buckets did not exert too much pressure on the spigot. You’d put worms in the second container, and food scraps in the uppermost container. As the worms eat, reproduce and whatever else it is they do, they defecate, and since their poop is liquid-like, it ideally drains and pools in the bottom container. You feed the worms for a while (The food gets turned to compost, since that is what worms do) and let their material build up. Now after you have a justifiable amount, that is where the spigot comes in again. Just turn it and collect their manure bounty, and use it on a plant, it’s an all purpose fertilizer. Oh yeah, but you have to actually get the worms to begin with. Digging through compost (Goat compost) looking for a bounty of worms to add to our buckets, which we dumped into the container afterwards. After that, we started doing some planting near the potatoes, which included digging some more trenches, planting (I think they were more greens) a few things, including the remainder of the potatoes that had not been planted (Because of the number and size of the “eyes” they had, eyes being the places where their roots grow). Digging their trenches, layering it with dirt and compost, and then digging little earth holes and tucking them into it, both wholly and halved. After this there was a break and we ate. There is a lot to do right now, and still a lot to be done, which is going to be fun. The last thing I did was wash eggs idly – and then my ride arrived, signaling the end of the day.