Our Crop Field Comes to Life...
This summer and autumn our crop field is filling up and coming to life. As mentioned earlier, we started with asparagus, and then moved onto potatoes. Next came kale, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, basil, flowers, pumpkins and winter squash. By the August we were adding our autumn selections of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, lots and lots of lettuce, cabbage, beets, turnips, onions, fennel, kohlrabi, and more kale. Our wonderful Farm Stand is opening up in the afternoons and school families are purchasing healthy, organic produce grown by their very own children to enjoy at home! To date we have donated almost 200 lbs of produce to the Napa Valley Food Bank, and a small amount of our produce is being purchased by Justin-Siena High School for their food service program.
Seeding in the Greenhouse
Lots of Work!
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Why the Fabric?
We are experimenting with a permeable fabric as a mulch layer for many of our beds. The weed pressure is intense in our crop field and we are experimenting with different ways to help control weed growth so that students (and farmers) are not spending every minute of their waking farm time pulling weeds. The fabric we're using is a permeable, woven landscape fabric that we plan to re-use over and over again, as long as it holds up (hopefully 8-10 years). So far it has far exceeded our expectations in blocking out weed growth, and helping to maintain soil moisture in the windy afternoons.
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First Harvests
Our Asparagus Forest...
In Our Crop Field... It All Starts With the Letter "A"... Asparagus!
This April our Third Graders planted the very first vegetables in our newly bedded-up crop field. Like the 50 fruit trees planted in January, the 200 small asparagus crowns they planted are an investment for the future too. With love and care, our students will be harvesting and eating asparagus from our farm for many, many years to come.