Week 5 Update - Young Farmers

Hey Farm School Families,

It’s so good to be back! Today the weather was absolutely perfect and we took full advantage of it. We started off in our sit spots, taking in the sights, smells and sounds of the morning. We then had a discussion about this being the “lean time” of the year in earlier times, when food stores for the winter would be running low, and yet too early to harvest from the farm. People would be actively foraging for fresh greens to supplement their diets. We foraged a bit on the farm, and found a few of these wonderful delicious wild herbs: henbit, woodsorrel, chickweed, and mallow. Many of the wild weeds are not only delicious, but very high in vitamins, minerals and other healing constituents. You can imagine how wonderful these would taste of all you’ve had is salted meat and root vegetables for the last feed month!

Things are really picking up at the farm, and these kids really helped out today. They started by adding several giant bags of leaves to our compost pile, then moved on to starting sweet potato slips. The process is simple: you just cut the sweet potato in half and poke three toothpicks in to hold it in a jar of water. In a few weeks, we should start seeing roots and little sprouts emerging from the eyes. Once the plants are big enough, we’ll break them off and plant them in pots before transplanting onto the farm. The next task was to pot up a flat of heirloom tomatoes. The seeds were started less than a month ago, but it’s still too cold at night for tomatoes, so we have to plant them into individual containers and protect them in the hoophouse until planting conditions are right. The varieties we planted today were Prudens Purple, Japanese Black Trifele, and Amish Paste. Many more tomatoes to come…

After lunch, we joined up with the Builders class for an epic game of Bird Survival. Sorry no pictures, but I guarantee we all had a fabulous time!

See you next week, 

Ms. Bridget