From Emma...

Another week of the summer has come and gone. The work in the garden has finally shifted from mainly weeding to harvesting. Our purple and yellow string beans are coming in droves, the cucumbers are getting big faster than we can pick them, and we have more kohlrabi than we know what to do with. A highlight for me this past week was Tuesday evening, the 27th. Earlier in the day we had dug potatoes and picked a large tub of green beans so we decided to cook a big meal and eat the fruits of our labor all together. So together we scrubbed and diced the potatoes, snapped the peas, cut onions and fried up sausage. It was a simple meal, but surrounded by friends, it was a feast. Plus, as Angie pointed out, almost everything was grown from a spitting distance away.

Another exciting part of the week was when we visited Tillers International, a non profit organization that focuses on international agricultural development. A large part of this is using draft animals to work the field. Everyone in our class got the opportunity to take a turn behind a plow pulled by a team of oxen. It was interesting to see how livestock and animals tie into sustainable agriculture.

We had our last Small Farm Management class on Thursday with Melissa Kinsey. We shared with each other our final business plans for our hypothetical farms. It looks as though we all will have very successful sustainable farms, or at least it appears so on paper.

On Friday morning, Roberta gave us a brief canning lesson and we canned dilly beans in a hot water bath. We also froze several more bags of string beans. So now we know how to preserve all the food that we know how to grow.

To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

Soils

From Angie...

There we were … undoing deposits left behind by glaciers that retreated some 11,000 years ago. Stones of all shapes and sizes dotted the plowed field. What were we thinking picking up those bits of Canada’s geologic legacy and tossing them into the wagon? As Agroecology students, we’ve learned a bit about the geologic history of this part of northern Indiana. One might ask what geology has to do with growing tomatoes and cucumbers. Quite a bit, it turns out.

That’s the thing about Agroecology … while many farmers and gardeners are mostly concerned about what goes on above ground—and rightfully so, we’ve discovered that a lot goes on under ground. An area’s geology and soils contributes to what can be grown there. Indeed, if we pay close attention to what’s going on with our soil—such as knowing the soil texture, knowing where the water table is, knowing what has grown there before, and knowing how the soil was treated (was it tilled when it was too wet or has it been driven on and compacted?), then we’re better able to respond appropriately to the soil conditions at hand in ways that will allow the soil to dance with life. The results are sure to be bountiful harvests produced by healthy plants. Indeed we’ve seen examples of how plants respond to living soils time and time again, here at Merry Lea and at the farms we’ve visited … especially after the stones are removed!

To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

From Lisle...

Well, it is very hard to believe that we are over halfway done with our time here at Merry Lea. Last week was week 5, and as it went by we said goodbye to our first two courses: Vegetable Crops and Soil Management.

After a Fourth of July cookout of bratwurst and oversized marshmallows, it was a busy and slightly stressful week for us—we had two exams (one on Tuesday and one on Thursday) and we had book reports and research papers about vegetable crops and their pests due on Thursday as well.

However, some of the stress was relieved by an entertaining trip to Larry Yoder’s family farm, where soybeans and asparagus are grown. We enjoyed looking at some of the problems with the corn in his gardens, and we helped mulch his tomatoes. We took a tour of the whole farm, which included a gravel pit and the Yoder Maple Sugar bush. There, they tap sugar maples for sap, which is boiled down to maple syrup during the late winter and early spring. Other highlights of our trip included pancakes with homemade maple syrup for lunch and a refreshing swim in the pond just before we headed home.

Between the schoolwork and the field trip, our kitchen gardens were somewhat neglected. Friday morning we weeded some of the walkways, which were quite overgrown. We enjoyed using a flame-weeder to attack some of them!

In addition to weeding, Friday was a return to coursework. We drove in to Goshen for a lecture from Ryan Sensenig on grazing, which kicked off our Agroecology course, which will occupy us for the next four weeks along with a class in Small Farm Management. We’re looking forward to the rest!

To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

The Week at Merry Lea

From Meg...

The weather was great this week with a short break from the humidity and heat. Everything in the garden is growing along nicely, and it's the time of the summer were it feels like the tomatoes need to be tied-up every-other day .

This week we spent time mulching with hay in the kitchen garden to prevent weeds from growing and moister loss. We also worked with the compost to get some new bins going and rotted hay bales out.

It was a week of pests: weeds, diseases and arthropods to be specific. We heard lectures from Dale and Dr. David Miller on pest management rather than pest control. On Tuesday we looked at the specimens we collected with our bug taps, comparing insect life found on a bare plot, mulched plot, and plot with a cover crop. We examined lots of mites, ants, springtails and even a few centipedes and pill bugs.

Mid-week we took a trip up to Michigan State's Kellogg Biological Station. There we got a tour from Dr. Doug Landis of their fields planted to research bio-fuels. With test plots for corn, switchgrass, prairie, miscanthus, and many others they monitor everything from insects to carbon emissions on these possible bio fuels of the future.

We finished out the week with bird banding on Thursday morning and a soils lab and lecture Friday. While bird banding we got to help Lisa Zinn in the banding of a few catbirds, an indigo bunting, and a bluebird. Friday we tried out both new and old tools for determining slope and the effects of erosion in agriculture.

Thank you to everyone who made it a great week to be an agroecology student at Merry Lea!

To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

From Anthony...

As a biology major and one of the two Goshen College students in this year’s Agroecology summer intensive, I was familiar with Merry Lea and the accompanying facilities beforehand. The connectedness that Merry Lea offers to the environment and its biological elements is what drew me here.

It has only been three weeks since the intensive started, yet already we have all comfortably fallen into the daily routine. It is hard to believe there is only a week and a half left in the first half of the intensive. But they say time flies when you’re having fun.

On Monday this week we visited Sustainable Greens, located just north of Constantine MI, where we were given a tour by the owners, James and Kate Lind. We learned how using only 4 acres of land, they are able to supply many restaurants in Chicago and still have enough product to sell at the farmers market.

Tuesday and Wednesday this week we had Vegetable Crops classes, Thursday and Friday was Soils. Outside of class we mulched parts of the Kitchen Garden as well as the Permaculture Garden and many of the trees at the Farmstead. The Kitchen Garden also received chicken wire around the bottom half of the existing fence because the rabbits have been, or were, showing great interest in our garden.

To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

From Angie, an ASI student this summer . . .

A wise friend once observed that without plants, we all die. Every single meal I eat, without exception, would not have been possible without plants. So, I decided that it might be a good idea to foster some kind of a relationship with the rooted members of the Earth community. 


About 10 years ago, I participated in the Master Gardener program … then in 2006, I earned a Masters Degree in Earth Literacy from St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Terre Haute, Ind., writing my thesis on how community gardens can contribute to food security in Indianapolis. 


But I wanted to delve deeper into the plant world. As it is, our global food supply relies primarily on a handful of grains. But to attain true community food security, shouldn’t we relearn not only the diversity of available plant foods that that our ancestors took for granted, but also how to grow them in ways that nourish the soil? 

To that end, I’m participating in Goshen College’s Agroecology Summer Intensive so that I might understand more of what my Hoosier ancestors understood, and so that I might share my learnings with others in the community.

And what better way to spend a summer learning than with six motivated and engaged college students and a great Merry Lea faculty and staff!


Photos submitted by Angie.


To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

Agroecology Summer Intensive gets underway

The 2010 Agroceology Summer Intensive (ASI) at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center began this week.  Students will spend 9 weeks taking four credits and applying their knowledge by working in the Kitchen and Permaculture Gardens.  In addition, nine field trips to area farms and related businesses are scheduled giving students opportunities to see agroecology principles in action.

The cohort of seven students is the largest in the 3 year history of the program.  And it’s an especially diverse group.  Geographically, students have come all the way from New York and New Mexico – and places in between – to study at Merry Lea for the summer.  One Hoosier rounds out the group.

Already two classes have started:  Vegetable Crops and Soils.  The first field trip to Metzger’s Farm near Wolf Lake took place on Tuesday.  Planting in the Kitchen Garden is almost complete. 

On Thursday morning, the ASI crew joined other staff and volunteers to plant the program gardens.  These plots will be used as a learning tool in Merry Lea’s fall Farmcraft programs.  In a blitz of activity, 1,750 square feet of space was planted, watered and mulched.  Also, the herb garden plot got a thorough and much needed weeding.

One more thing the students did:  they harvested and ate fresh lettuce, spinach and radishes from the hoophouse garden which had been planted in anticipation of their arrival.  It’s the first of many opportunities over the summer to savor the fruit of the land and of their own labor.


To learn more about the Agroecology Summer Intensive, visit the Merry Lea web site.

RM