Angel's Farm Reflection 19

Angel Arias                         Silk Tree Farm                        5/28/13

In the morning, I again did the process of watering the current grains, and soaking some new ones. We also discussed what would be happening around my project and my exhibition. As a conclusion to my project, I lead a workshop in my class based around sugar content in beverages, and as an activity I had them match empty bottles to bags containing sugar in an attempt to guess which amount of sugar corresponded to the bottle. Overall I feel as though people were genuinely interested and took something aware from the experience, which I was happy about. I am unsure if I will be running any further workshops, but form the way things are looking I don’t believe that I will be. Moving from this, we discussed the possibilities for things to do today, and we had a number of choices. In the back of the farm, Cathy started cutting up a lot of the greens to put into a salad mix, to potentially sell. Apparently when you cut greens, you don’t really destroy them, so they just grow back up repeatedly, allowing you to continue to harvest them until they inevitably stop growing. After putting that inside, Cathy stated we could fertilize the plants or mound up the potatoes more. I was curious to see what fertilizing the plants would be like, so we started doing that. Really though, since we weren’t using the worm poop to fertilize the plants, it wasn’t really that complex. We were just using some organic fertilizer, adding the correct amount of water to it, and then fertilizing plants with it. Something interesting that I learned is that some fertilizers can actually burn the leaves of a plant, so you should take some caution to either not get it directly on the plant or to make sure the fertilizer you’re using doesn’t burn. After we were done fertilizing the plants out towards the back, we started to fertilize the ones nearer the front as well. It was really the same thing, but we were using this fish meal stuff that had quite a scent to it instead of the other fertilizer. This fertilizer didn’t burn, so we didn’t really have to be as careful using it. After we were finished fertilizing all the plants, and after a break, we started mounding up some more hay around the potatoes. Something that is cool is that the potatoes have seemed to have really taken off. I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before; but in addition to potatoes being able to send out new chutes when surrounded by material, the green chutes that it send out turn poisonous if exposed to sunlight and can make you feel ill, which is another reason that you are supposed to mound them up as you go.