Slips and Bottles
Village Farm Team,
Harvest Green residents are having a blast bottle feeding the goats! Families have a chance to sign up for a time slot to help us raise our kids (goat babies) not only by feeding them, but by socializing and preparing the kids for an action-filled life on the Village Farm. Farm-Educator Kathryn provides the bottles and milk and a quick demonstration on how to properly handle and interact with the goats. Resident families are able to enter our chicken coop, which is perfect for serving as our temporary goat pen, while the large goat pen gets finishing touches, and feed and interact with our four young kids.
Community bottle feeding our Harvest Green baby goats.
The goats appear to be loving it too! Even our most cautious kid is rushing to the door to greet the families as they come in! We are learning their personalities and will involve the residents in their naming process in the coming weeks.
If you haven't signed up yet to feed the goats and are a resident in the Harvest Green please sign-up. There are plenty of spots available and it’s a wonderful chance to get to know your farm kids. Time slots and sign-up happens on Harvest Green Village Farm Webpage - Volunteer Sign-up. Even if you not interested in goat feeding, please be sure to sign-up to receive notifications in the Join My Mailing List in the top right-hand corner of the webpage.
In addition to construction happening on and around the farm, the farm itself is under going a seasonal shift! Plants are loving the warmer weather, despite the dryness we have been experiencing. With such dry weather, our subsurface irrigation is coming in handy! However, as the crops are loving the weather, so are the weeds! We have completed some wheel hoeing, mowing and weed eating (there’s a trend here somewhere) this week on some of our squash, cucumber, and melon beds. One of the greatest benefits of these sprawling crops is that they shadow out the weeds once they mature and help us tremendously with weed control. By killing weeds now, in the early stages, we provide the best conditions for a clean, covered bed later this season.
Another one of these sprawling vines that are great at weed suppression is sweet potatoes. Our slips arrived late Thursday afternoon making for a busy end of the week. Mail order agricultural starts are difficult to schedule but are a great way to get your farm off on the right foot! By ordering sweet potato slips, we were able to get them, pest free, from an area of the country that does not suffer from sweet potato weevils, one of the most damaging pest for this crop. However, the slips come bare root which means we need to get them in the ground and watered as quickly as we can! So when slips arrive, we drop everything to appropriately care for them and get them in the ground.
Newly planted sweet potato slip.
We also selected some varieties that are resistant to root knot nematodes. These are a parasitic pest that create galls on the roots which can greatly impact yield. We will be planting these varieties closest to the beds where we saw root knot nematode damage last fall in a different crop, our rutabagas. These pest are almost impossible to get rid of once they are established and it is important to create barriers to prevent spreading.
Root galls on a rutabaga created by root knot nematodes.
Happy Harvesting,
Agmenity Farm Team
