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.

Angel's Farm Reflection 13

Angel Arias                Silk Tree Farm Reflection                  4/2/13

Today we did a lot of planting, which is happening pretty frequently since it is pretty much the beginning of the season and pretty much all the plants should be going into the ground right about now. In the morning, I’d noticed that the sprouts from Tuesday had grown more. I’d also been sent out with the task of gathering eggs from the chickens that morning, a task that seemed pretty simple and intrinsic. But I suppose the chickens used their psychic mind-prognosis abilities to predict my walking patterns and knew that I would be coming to collect their bounty, because a bunch of them were just lying around in their egg box, refusing to move and denying me ability to collect their eggs. I tried to get some of them out of the way but it wasn’t very effective; so I grabbed what I could and told Cathy what was going on and that was that. We’d later be feeding the sprouts to the chickens, but first we planted some more seeds into the ground; which consisted of digging trenches like last time, filling them in, and slashing at detrimental roots. Garlic, and some other plants, they may have been chive. In any matter, I grabbed some compost from the greenhouse, filled in the trench and then started planting some garlic into the ground. I suppose something I didn’t know before was that when garlic grows, it grows upwards out of the upper part of the onion in things I started calling by the moniker; “onion strings”. They’re strings that stretch out of the onion, and I didn’t really notice that until morning when we were in the kitchen eating, and I noticed some attached to an upper part of an onion. I inquired about it, and then I asked if it was possible to eat. “I don’t know,” was the answer I got, and that was pretty much good enough for me, besides it was only an onion piece. Picked a piece and ate it; pretty strong garlic flavor, but really good, probably for a soup or something rather than a garnish. But anyway; back to the farming. I’m sure that garlic also has quite the root system, but I just found it pretty interesting that garlic had those grassy shoots that went up instead of the fanned-out leaves a lot of other plants have. After planting the garlic (Which, some of it was rotted/rotting, so we’re being hopeful) I helped plant the chives as well. We also checked up on the goats during it, but after we were done planting we gave the rest of the plants, the ones that hadn’t been watered yet, quite a drink, especially the ones we’d just planted. It’s fun to see plants you work on to cultivate sprouting up and growing; procreating the bounty that has grown to fruition through your efforts. From this point, we weren’t very sure what to do, and we observed some of the plants for a while before concluding that we would try to go to the front yard and clean it up a bit; get rid of some of the more useless plants so Cathy could later till it up and convert it into a garden. I dug out some front yard plant, but efforts to successful separate and pot it were a bit less than successful, so we then resolved to go figure out what to do again. After a bit more discussion, we again decided that we would do work on the blog and upload photos, then head outside and start planting. Or take pictures of the plants we’d planted to show the progress that they had made and the work that we had done so far, as well as the work had done more recently. It took a little while to get every post up because the pictures (From the days that we took pictures, anyway) were kind of all over the place, plus it was at this point that we ate. Eventually though we got all of them up, and by that time there wasn't much time in the day left. So we went outside and took pictures of plants all over the place, it was cool because a lot of them were really starting to come up. I can’t wait to see them when they’re full-grown though, it’ll be very rewarding and awesome-looking, the last phase of the process. Plus, we can eat some of it, and it’ll also be fun to see kind of what works well and what doesn't  and connect whatever circumstances and valuables…it’ll be really interesting to see things develop and how they turn out. This will be something I really look forward to in the future. After we returned back inside, my ride arrived signaling the end of my day at Silk Tree Farm.

Angel's Farm Reflection 12

Angel Arias                         Silk Tree Farm                            3/30/13

Today was a really fun day that had been packed with things to do, things that had to be polished that had not been completely done, and entirely new things all together. In the morning before we went out, I looked over to the table and to my surprise I noticed…sprouts. But not really sprouts that were too similar in comparison to the other sprouts we did, these ones were doing quite well and had also been going for a bit, from the last Thursday prior, if I remember correctly. These ones had been soaked in peroxide, for sterilization, and I remember that because last Thursday (When they were soaking) I asked about what they were in and why it was bubbling a bit. The peroxide was cleaning their hulls and during that process, the peroxide mixture bubbled a bit while cleaning impurities off them; and, it was more morally comforting than soaking them in bleach. Cathy also said that she was going to let them go until at least Thursday, to see how they do given the time constraint to that extent. When we went outside, we started doing some more work on the rooty land nearer the back of the farm. I didn’t really know what we were going to do at first; we both started off with rakes to scrape up the roots and a machete to cut them. But then, as I started to chop down a bunch of roots I discovered that I had an affinity for slashing at roots with the machete. So I continued to do that for a while, and let me just say, hacking at roots, particularly the bigger, thicker roots that are typically connected to trees can be very draining work. But the feeling of accomplishment you get when you swing really hard and it just splits underneath the pressure of your swing is awesome. After doing a bit or raking, and doing a bunch of hacking, Tom returned and started digging up some trenches where we going to plant some of the plants we already had going in the seed starters. I think some of it may have been red lettuce, and the rest were all variations of lettuce. Not all of it went into the ground though; Cathy told me that she was going to be selling some of the seed starter racks as packed, priced accordingly for people to grow on their own. We dug the trenches, and during that I had to run and grab some compost from the greenhouse to add to the trenches. First I had to wait for Tom to grab out some of the wild tomatoes that been growing in the compost itself, which went into buckets of moist soil. After that I grabbed a bunch of compost and started delivering it liberally into the trenches that hadn’t been filled in yet, trying to get in enough so that I could spread it around in the trench for the plants to have access to. I believe it was about right after this that Tom started yanking at a tree stump that was in the ground. Then he said that it was a tractor job, and I went to get the tractor. He moored a loop of rope to the end of the tractor over a bulb, and underneath the stump. After a bit of learning what to do, and some reversing and accelerating, the stump yanked out of the ground, done and gone for. After taking a bit of a break, we headed back outside and started working on the chicken coops. I was forking and then raking the remains of what was unfinished in the smaller coop, while Cathy got to work on the larger one. While I was walking on the smaller one, being right next to a tree there were some roots that were getting in the way of my digging and raking. I was only able to tolerate it for so long before I grabbed the machete again and started eliminating some of the ones that were more in the way. After I was eventually completed with this task, I started walking over to Cathy, pitchfork in hand ready to do some work when I heard some familiar noises from the front of the house. My ride was there to pick me up; I had completely lost all sense of time. That was the end of my day at Silk Tree Farm.

Angel's Farm Reflection 11

Angel Arias                  Silk Tree Farm Reflection                     3/25/13

Today was actually much better than some other, more dreary days. I’m hoping that this kind of weather keeps up so that we can be doing as much outdoor things as possible. Morning consisted of CDT shots for the goats, preventive inoculation so that the goats were immune to sickness and in addition to what it did, it also protected them from an overeating disorder that goats can develop. It was mostly the kids that were getting the shot, and for the most part they weren’t really a fan of being separated and given shots. Some were a bit less feisty and difficult than others, especially so for the adults. The shots were to be administered to a certain part of the goat, closer to the backside, and after they were given the spot was have to be rubbed earnestly for a bit of time to prevent infection. They took their shots gracefully while locked in the milking stand, distracted while gnawing away at some goat feed. I was more observant than participating, Tom was holding the baby goats and Cathy was distributing the shots. After this, we had some more peas to plant; the old ones had somehow rotted into the ground and not planted properly. The begetter of this issue wasn’t really known, maybe it had to do with the age of the seeds, perhaps something else had messed the seeds while they were in the ground. Regardless, we also planted the pea seeds and went to the Greenhouse. In the Greenhouse, we took a look at the progress that the plants we’d previously planted. Then we gathered a bunch of compost for the potatoes that we would also be planting that day, but not before digging the ditches that the potatoes would go in. Potatoes need ditches because their roots grow up when they develop as a plant and procreate new potatoes. After planting in the potatoes and layering them with ample compost, we moved on to something else. We started planting carrots in the same area, along the fenceline that separated the land from the other plants.

Angel's Farm Reflection 10

Angel Arias                  Silk Tree Farm Reflection                    4/23/13

Today, lamentably, was a somber rainy day, for the most part anyway. So it probably would have not been too much fun to be outside all day. Therefore, it took us a while to figure out what we were going to do, and Tom told me about the plywood that he had bought at the Re-Store down at Habitat For Humanity down the road. Apparently, plywood is usually pretty expensive, but since it is the Re-Store and they probably didn’t need it anyway, it was selling for five dollars a piece, and the boards themselves were 4x8 each. Being so huge, they were supported by nails, bolts and 2x4s, a whole lot of supply for a modest price. Take it all apart and you have a whole bunch of work to do, as well as a whole bunch of supplies. Now this all seemed pretty cool and handy, but Tom also told me that he had bought forty of them.
So let me break it down:
Forty 4x8 plywood boards
Two people
A truck, a trailer
A short distance
And we ended up decided on five boards every trip

So altogether, eight trips loading and if you count the unloading, eight unloading sessions as well.
40/5= 8

Now don’t get me wrong it wasn’t really too arduous, really, but what I was trying to convey was the amount of time it took to unload all of it. Even considering that we gradually became better at the whole loading/unloading process in and of itself, driving there and back, loading and unloading all in all was a pretty gangly process.

Additionally, we stopped halfway through and had lunch. So it wasn’t really a straight-shot job.

But at the end of the day (and I mean that quite literally) we were finished moving and unloading all of the plywood. Actually, we were pulling in the driveway with the last load when it was time for me to leave. But before I touch on that, let me say another thing; the intended use for all this neat plywood. It was intended to be used to create some sort of storage shed, perhaps for hay or for tools, or both, but something more or less along those lines. The only thing I can think of that would make that a pain would be lugging the hay down the goat pen, but then again, I actually don’t know where the construction of the shed would even be. Maybe next time, we’ll be working on that, figuring out where that shed would be or maybe we’d just be building it, which could be fun.
When considering that the day was kind of sullen weather-wise, I’d say that we got what we needed to get done finished – and it wasn’t so bad. I’m just hoping that on Thursday, the weather is better and we’ll get to be outside so we can get a lot of outdoor work done.

As a last note, I got to see the baby chicks that had been moved into the space where the other laying hens were, and I also got to see the plants that we had planted before Spring break, which were starting to sprout and come up. I think that was a really cool experience for me, because I think I got to see the work we did start to pay off, and that is one of the greatest moments when you’re farming. Getting to see your hard work come to a rewarding culmination…but I’ll have to wait longer a bit for that full experience.