Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Reflections on Last Semester

Tess wrote up these reflections about the Fall season:

Overall, given the challenges we face as a club with minimal continuity and funding, this was a good season! We got a lot of volunteers out and exposed to the farm, we had several classes and clubs get involved, we donated most (still waiting on those numbers) of our produce to the local men's shelter, and a fair amount also to Bon Ap. We were also featured in the campus news several times. That stuff even grew to harvest was awesome! Of course, we also had some problems.

the biggest problem was the lack of continuity from summer to fall which lead to us sort of getting organized and starting everything just a little bit too late. the things we got in at the start of october did okay but were still a little small, so that was kind of a downer. while we had substantial harvests of spinach, arugula, kale, mustard greens, radishes, and parsley, the lettuce and chard were put in too late to grow much at all, although some of the lettuce did soldier through the snow in the row cover. the beets suffered from lack of water and weren't really noteworthy and the turnips we planted never germinated. the collard greens were harvested once but in a way that prevented them from growing back. we also planted garlic to harvest in the summer!

other issues:
-over seeding lead to plants being too close together despite thinning. plants want to grow---stick to less seeds and reseeding if necessary in the future
-lack of water! this was a really dry fall and we needed more irrigation than we initially thought would be the case
-better pest management--the spinach could have really used some approach to dealing with the aphids, just didn’t have time for that! ideally with more volunteers things like this could get taken care of
-the agribon row cover really only worked using the long bamboo poles to hold it down-using ground staples and the hoops to hold it down just ended up with it ripping holes in the fabric

good things!
-the straw really kept down the weeds, that was awesome. we did very minimal weeding
-no problems with animals!
-using the row cover seemed to help the lettuce keep living through snow!

in terms of recruiting volunteers/publicity:
-not many people came to the open work days that took place regularly during the week, more people came to the more organized ‘volunteer days’ that happened periodically throughout the semester
-contacting clubs, classes and other campus organizations (sports teams) was a good way to get people out there....but in this case quality control is a big issue!
-going to the community free market was really positive, as was offering samples of food. people really like that and it connects the dots between farm/dirt/working and food they want to eat!
-had trouble having meetings that were not on the farm....seemed to have lots of trouble drumming up interest in doing the planning, this is probably due partly to the general lack of momentum that happens every fall
-how to structure the leadership? ideally this would be a collective process but how to do that when some people have more time/commitment than others?

Spring 2011

We are looking forward to a new season on the farm and have been working on getting a grant for some money for over the summer today. Hopefully soon we will be buying some seeds. Also, we are going to start thinking about how we want the Community Garden this semester. Plots? Herbs? All berry bushes?