Save the Dates!
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CSA pickups begin June 12. Pickups are Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays from 3 PM to 7:30 PM at the farm. For more information...
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Looking for...
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Long-time
CSA shareholders missed out on the signup and would love to split a share.
If you are interested, please email Amanda the farm manager and she will get you in touch with them.
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Third Sunday Gatherings
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Third Sunday Gatherings are back this season! For those of you who are new
to the farm or to Third Sunday Gatherings, they are a great opportunity to meet
fellow shareholders and learn about various topics related to our mission. Each
time, we will start with a farm-fresh potluck at five o'clock followed by a
guest speaker.
June 17th - Composting, Karen DiFranza of Down to Earth Farm
(Hubbardston) - As harvest begins, Karen will teach us how we can put the
vegetable scraps to good use.
July 15th - Eat Your Greens Contest - Can't get your kids
to eat Kohlrabi, Kale, Collards, etc.? Bring a potluck
kid-friendly dish, and a copy of the recipe, using one
of the more unfamiliar or unpopular vegetables in your household. We'll let the
kids sample first and judge their favorites. Recipe exchange and discussion
will follow.
August 19th - Putting Food By: An Introduction to
Preservation Methods - Is the harvest becoming too
bountiful? Come learn the basics of preservation so you can look forward to a
"local" taste of summer during the long New England winter.
September 16th - ***TBD***Have Suggested Topics or Speakers? - send
them to Alison Horton.
October 21st - Panel on WFCF Programs: Hunger Relief, Education, Volunteers - Representatives from various
WFCF programs will talk about the work they do.
November 18th - Harvest Potluck - Details to follow.
December 16th - Winter Solstice - Details to follow.
Third Sunday Gatherings begin at 5. Please bring a farm-fresh potluck item to share and in the interest of
conservation, your own place setting.
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Greetings!
First CSA
Pickups at the farm are:
- Tuesday, June 12,
3-7:30 PM
- Thursday,
June 14, 3-7:30 PM
- Sunday,
June 17, 3-7:30 PM
First CSA
Pickup in Somerville:
Pick-your-own
hours begin June 12. You can pick your
own herbs, flowers, and designated veggies during daylight hours every day
except Fridays and Saturdays. We'll put
a list of currently available crops in the newsletter each week. Come work
with us on the farm! You are welcome to
drop in at 8:30 or 1:30 on Sundays, Tuesdays or Thursdays to help out in the
fields or the greenhouse. No need to
call ahead, but if you have questions, please email Andy. Contribute
to the newsletter! Send recipes, articles, poems, and photos to Susan Cassidy, our shareholder communications
coordinator.
Don't
forget to send in your final CSA payment by June 1! Mail payments to us at Waltham Fields Community
Farm, 240 Beaver Street,
Waltham, MA 02452. Drop Amanda an email if you have any questions about your CSA share.
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SPROUT... a success!
Thanks so
much to everyone who attended SPROUT, Waltham Fields Community Farm's
fundraiser at the beautiful Paine Estate.
It was a wonderful evening filled with great music, an incredible silent
auction, and tasty food. The generosity
and support of our community was on great display that evening, as we met and
even exceeded our goal of raising $20,000!
SPROUT is an important annual celebration for
Waltham Fields - it is a chance to come together to launch the growing season,
and to raise funds necessary for running our hunger relief and educational
programs throughout the year. If you
would like to be a part of making this event happen in 2008, we would love for
you to join the SPROUT committee. To
indicate your interest now, send a quick email to Meg. We'll
start meeting in the late fall, so stay tuned! |
Introducing Kate and Martin
Kate Darakjy and Martin
Lemos, 2007 Assistant Growers
This year,
we are extremely grateful to have Kate Darakjy and Martin Lemos with us as
Assistant Growers for the season. Both
bring a combination of farming and people skills to their work with us, and
have jumped in to lead volunteer groups, transplant thousands of vegetable
seedlings, and work with all of our tractors in their first month on the farm.
Kate is a
native of Vermont. Her resume came to us a few moments before
the final deadline for applications, accompanied by an email that read 'getting
this in right under the deadline, phew.
Thanks for checking it out.' Talking with her during her interview was
like having a conversation with an old friend, and ever since she arrived on
the farm she has thrown herself into her work with passion and good humor. Kate has worked on organic farms in Arizona and Western Massachusetts, and is a graduate of Lesley University's
Audubon Expedition Institute. She has
spent large portions of the past five years as a backcountry caretaker and
field supervisor for the Green Mountain Club, where she developed her
management skills and an impressive degree of self-motivation. It is very hard to take a photograph of Kate,
because she so rarely stands still (that's Kate attaching the spader to the tractor above). She has a passion for human waste
composting, and she's presenting on the subject at SolarFest in Vermont in July (find
out more at www.solarfest.org). Kate hopes to participate in the management of
a community farm in the future, so a season at Waltham Fields is a perfect next
step for her to develop her farming skills.
Martin was
born in Uruguay but moved to
New Jersey
when he was seven. He has worked on a
family farm in New Mexico and also
participated in the grape harvest at Cameron Winery in Oregon, where he developed a taste for white
burgundy. He is a graduate of Hamilton College
in New York,
where he studied comparative literature and mathematics, causing Kate to joke
that he can read and do math, which
turns out to be quite true. His
extensive farming experience comes primarily from his 16-month apprenticeship
at Sauvie Island Organics in Portland,
Oregon, where he took on roles as
varied as greenhouse manager, harvest manager and assistant field manager. Martin knows that farming is in his long-term
future, and believes that "this country is on the cusp of realizing the
importance of sustainable food systems and now is the time to push that
realization to the forefront." He
is hoping to find a piano teacher for the season, if anyone knows a good one!
Both
Martin and Kate are living in Waltham, where
they're enjoying the local night life and the chance to run and kayak along the
Charles River.
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Seeds, cookbooks, & gardening books Recommendations by shareholders and farmers...
Seed sources
Johnny's
Selected Seeds, Albion, ME www.johnnyseeds.com One of the
outstanding seed providers in New England. Consistently high quality, a good range of
varieties and good customer service keep us ordering from Johnny's year after
year.
Fedco
Seeds, Waterville, ME www.fedcoseeds.com Maine
cooperative seed packer has phased out all seed varieties owned by Monsanto,
and provides information on seed sources.
Great varieties. Also a source
for organic gardening supplies in small and large quantities.
High
Mowing Seeds, Wolcott, VT
www.highmowingseeds.com. Family
owned organic seed company. Really great
people. Really great seeds. Need we say more?
Seed
Saver's Exchange, Decorah, IA
www.seedsavers.org A nonprofit
organization dedicated to the preservation of heirloom seeds. Outstanding varieties of rare seeds,
including some of our favorite tomatoes, that are unavailable elsewhere.
Cookbooks
Farmer
John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on
Vegetables by John Peterson. A CSA farmer from Illinois writes a cookbook... and some
pretty amazing columns about farming as well.
Local
Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America's
Farmer's Marketsby Deborah
Madison. Amanda's personal favorite for
a fancy dinner, filled with delicious recipes for just about every vegetable we
grow.
From the
Cook's Gardenby Ellen Ogden. Also make sure to check out her seeds and
plants at www.cooksgarden.com
From
Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to
Cooking with Farm-Fresh Produceby the
Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition. Easy, delicious recipes that focus on veggies
grown on community supported farms.
Gardening
books
The Garden
Primer by Barbara Damrosch. A
well-written, practical guide to gardening, including flowers, trees, vegetables
and much more. A great basic text and
reference for the novice or experienced gardener.
The New
Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman.
Focused on pretty intensive vegetable gardening, but a great book on
everything from crop rotation to planting extra for the bugs.
How to
Grow More Vegetables and The Sustainable Vegetable Garden
by John Jeavons. Classics in the field
of organic home gardening. Send us
your suggestions! We'd love to hear from
all of you.
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Crop Updates
It's
spring in New England! If it's not 35 degrees and raining, it's 80
degrees and sunny. In general, despite
the vagaries of the weather, our crops are growing well. We switched potting soils in the greenhouse,
and our seedlings seem stronger and better nourished this spring. Thanks to generally favorable weather and the
help of many volunteers, we've kept right on schedule with direct seeded and
transplanted crops, with the notable exception of our peas, which went in late
and germinated slowly because of a cold wet weather at the beginning of
April.
We're
keeping a close eye on our alliums (onions, leeks, scallions and shallots) and
our brassicas (kale, kohlrabi, broccoli and cabbage), which are usually visited
at this time by root maggot flies, which lay their eggs around the base of the
plants and tunnel into the roots as the larvae hatch. By the time the forsythia flowering is done
and the weather warms up for good, we are usually out of the woods, but we
generally have some damage to our early crops nonetheless.
Carrots,
beets, lettuce (that's red lettuce in the photo above), spinach, and Swiss chard are growing away, although they've
been set back a little by the extremely dry weather we've been having for the
past two weeks (you know it's dry when the National Weather Service issues a
fire weather watch for Waltham). The first planting of tomatoes
(affectionately called the "suicide planting" by local farmer Chris
Yoder) is in the ground, getting over the shock of its transfer from the
greenhouse to the field, suffering through some chilly nights on its way to
August bounty.
This
season, we will be buying in our potatoes and winter squash, which are
being
grown for us by Jenny and Bruce Wooster at their farm in Winchester,
New Hampshire. Jenny is a former Waltham Fields farm manager
with strong ties to our community. We
will also be purchasing IPM sweet corn from Verrill Farm in Concord,
MA,
as part of our CSA shares this season. You
can find out more about both of these farms on their websites at www.picadillyfarm.com and www.verrillfarm.com. We are excited about these partnerships with
local family farms with a strong commitment to sustainable agriculture.
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From all the staff at Waltham Fields Community Farm:
Meg Coward, Executive Director Amanda Cather, Farm Manager Andy Scherer, Assistant Farm Manager Kate Darakjy and Martin Lemos, Assistant Growers Josh Levin, Vincent Errico, Anna Wei, and Sara Franklin, Interns
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