Today I woke up a little late; I have recently woken up wide-eyed in the morning, excited to hop out of bed to travel to City Farm, but for some reason my mind went on a vacation, dreaming, this morning-- straight through my alarm. I blame it on the Sage Rich gave me the other day- I did have some interesting dreams last night :P
I managed to get ready in 5 minutes and motored over to the farm, arriving at around 9:30... Thankfully, Rich was very forgiving about my late arrival. Today we harvested for the Thursday afternoon Parade Street Farmers' Market. I was able to munch on some Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas for breakfast while harvesting this particularly delicious variety.
The raspberries are ripening very quickly at the farm- a couple weeks before they usually arrive. This is one part of climate change that has been visible: a shift in the growing season. Farmers have a firsthand look at the effects that are taking place in the climate and are also given the task of having to prepare for these changes.
Building up the soil with organic matter is one important part of the preparation for climate change that will put organic growers at an advantage. If rains come with greater vigor, rich non-compacted soil, reinforced with compost, will be able to better absorb the rains than that which is highly degraded from synthetic fertilizer. Similarly, if droughts occur, humus-rich soil is able to retain water at a much greater amount than degraded soil.
After harvesting peas, Patricia, Wendy, an older volunteer, and I stepped over to harvest some Sage. While clipping off the top of the larger stalks (giving it a "haircut" :D ), Patricia and I looked over and saw Wendy struggling to unravel a poor sage plant from the grasps of a bind weed.
This vine-y plant is highly invasive and can quickly take your garden out, turning it into a bind weed monoculture. Rich has been pulling this plant out and throwing it straight into the trash- it is just too much of a risk to even think about composting it. The rest of the morning I was put to the task of trying to eliminate the bind weed from this area. I spent more than an hour carefully unwinding the tendrils from sage plants and trying to unroot this crazy ivy-like monster. I even saw it attempting to creep towards the chard! Okay, so it doesn't grow that fast, but it was only a couple days away from being able to strangle out a golden chard plant. The roots on this plant are very hard to rip out of the ground. I found myself breaking the plant halfway down the root, and then digging into the earth in search of the other half.
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