Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Double Digging Starts the Year off Right on the Sustainable Agriculture Farm



Over the summer, our farm expanded up onto the hill to give students easy access to our orchard and vineyard. These trees and vines will hopefully allow for a new type of crop for sale at farm days.
We now have 3 classes of Sustainable Agriculture, allowing for more beds to be closely monitored by students on the farm. Instead of only the A beds being used for students' one bed assignments, we have also moved to using the B beds, which have been tarped the entire summer to reduce weeds, although it has also dried out the beds leaving a lot of room for compost and soil improvement.

This week, students were assigned beds on the farm and given the task of double digging, which removes weeds, aerates the soil, and adds back nutrients and raises the beds to prepare for another year of growing crops. They also added compost and phyta-grow, an organic fertilizer, to help replenish the soil's nutrients.
As a second year student and Lab Tech, I have been working on preparing a D bed for heavy yields for our market days, as well as helping students in class with any questions about the farm. We have also added tarps to some C beds so they will be ready to plant in for our winter season and cleaned out the seedlings in the hoop house so we can bring in new seedlings for planting next week or the week after.

Micaela Wilcox

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