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.
