Today Rich and I traveled to several different places to donate some extra food from the farm. The Genesis Center on Potter's Ave was the first stop- this place is an adult education center that provides a window of opportunity for immigrants, refugees, and low-income residents to learn valuable skills; City Farm donates food to the organization's culinary arts program.
After dropping off lettuce, mint, and some other delicious produce from the farm, we were treated to some awesome fries from the chefs-in-training at the Genesis Center. The next stop we made was over at the Rhode Island Food Bank. I was surprised that we were donating to the Food Bank because I had figured that this type of organization would only accept canned food. I was really excited to find out that fresh food is accepted because it seems that the people who need fresh food the most are often those who have the least amount of access to it.
Rich loves the idea of community exchange; a concept in which many different people participate in a barter system where everyone engages in their individual interests, contributing to the community in exchange for other people's contributions. He even implements this idea of exchange with produce and compost pick-ups.. At the Friendship Cafe, Rich delivers produce in exchange for coffee credits. At White Electric, he picks up coffee grounds in exchange for coffee credits as well. Being a lover of coffee, I would not mind growing food in exchange for coffee.
Hearing Rich talk about this, I was reminded of the alternative money system in Ithaca. "Ithaca Hours" are slips of paper that are used to trade one person's hour of work, for another. For example, you are a carpenter that works on someone's house for one hour. You receive a slip of paper that entitles you to one hour of another person's skill. This is an interesting form of bartering that would perhaps be a little more tricky when it comes to farming. So many hours are spent on the farm tending after plants.. how would you even be able to calculate how many hours you spent planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, cleaning/bagging, etc. for a bunch of collard greens? If you know anything about how this barter system works in terms of food, then I would love to know- leave a comment!
The rest of the day we spent harvesting for the Hope Street Market. The Gator Spinach is finally reaching a large enough size and volume to harvest! I have never tried this type of Spinach, but I am sure it is popular at the market because it is a variety that you never really see for sale.
Gator Spinach <3
Rich also put us to work on the raspberry patch- It is absolutely amazing how many raspberries these bushes have produced over the past few weeks.
Rich likes to keep notes everyday, recording when the first harvest of certain plants take place, if it rained, and other information about the produce and farm. He took out two calendars and laid them out next to each other. One was from last year and the other, from this season. Little notes and drawings filled every square- a thorough recording. He looked at month of June 2009-- First Raspberry eatin'- June 30th. Tracing his finger over this year's calendar, he stopped at June 9th, 2010. The raspberries were in fact, nearly 3 weeks early this year. I am a strong believer of climate change, but I was really surprised to see such a difference in only a year. I will be interested to see when the first picking happens next summer...
Sean, the apprentice at the farm, is full of useful information about farming as well. Just yesterday he told me that the more raspberries you pick, the more raspberries your bushes will produce. This makes sense if you think about it in the energy exchange sense- when a ripe raspberry is picked, the plant no longer has to put energy into making that one raspberry more ripe that it already is, and that energy can go towards ripening another, less ripe, raspberry. You just have to make sure that you don't accidentally rip off a whole bunch of unripe raspberries when you only meant to get one ripe one. That seems to happen to me more than I would like it to. That concept also applies to peas and tomato plants.
oops, picked off a bunch of unripe berries...
I have always enjoyed taking clippings of plants, putting them in water, watching them grow roots, and them eventually planting them. My roommates and I always do this with geraniums in our house. Recently, I found out something new about how to grow tomato plants from clippings... Sean told me that if you pick off a large sucker, you can just stick the end of it right into a pot. I am super excited to have learned that little tip about tomatoes.. they are one of my favorite savory fruits- well, avocados too of course. It is a little harder to grow avo's in this northeast weather though.
Sucker plant!
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