Angel's Farm Reflection 18

Angel Arias                             Silk Tree Farm                        5/23/13

Today was another busy day, in the morning we discussed what was going to be happening for the day, and we also started preparing some milk to be made into cheese. Cathy said that because of the state of the milk (Nothing too bad, just was unsure), she’d prefer to pasteurize it just in case there was anything bad in it. In one pot, was some water, and in the pot that was inside of that pot, went the milk. You don’t put the pot directly on the flame, because that would cause the milk to burn and in turn, the cheese would not taste too great. We’ve also started including the fodder system into our morning chores, and by this I mean: Get the seeds, soak them, add bleach, and leave them. Another thing that we’ve started to do on a somewhat-regular basis is add hay to the potato plants. Potato plants grow upwards and send out chutes to grow more potatoes, and if you cover the base of the plant with additional hay or material, the potato plant will send out an increased amount of chutes due to the extra room to do so; that is why some people plant potato in hay stacks. So we’ve made something of a habit of doing that. Between filling a container, carrying it over, and placing down hay around the plants, the entire thing takes some time. We also checked back on the milk every now and then, because after you heat it to a certain degree you also dunk it in ice-water, and when the temperature drops to a certain degree you again, remove it. Watering some of the plants is also something that I started to do, in the front the soil is rather sandy, so I think that it would be a good idea to water it regularly, whereas the other plants’ have soil that keeps the moisture in better. Near the back, close to Malback and Percy’s pen is a small piece of land that Paige (Cathy’s daughter) was going to be maintaining, but didn’t end up keeping it, so Cathy and I planted some new plants in it, and watered it. Some of the plants that were already planted in there, like the cabbage, strawberry plants, and kale were for the most part alive, and so we’re just kind of hoping that those will make it. But of course there are also the plants that we put in there as well, and we only used a portion of the piece to plant on since a lot of it was populated by living plants. Another cool thing that we did was grabbing the salt pork (Pork fat, I think it may have been called “Leaf lard”) that had been soaking in a saltwater brine for some time, and slicing it, then vacuum-sealing it inside specially-made bag for later use. This was all we did for today at Silk Tree Farm.