On August 5, the nine-week Agroecology Summer Intensive came to a close. Rieth Village has been much quieter now that the students have gone their separate ways. However, as the summer wanes, the activity here at Rieth Village does not! The crops that the students helped to plant and tend continue to flourish and with five fewer enthusiastic farmers on hand, those of us left have been quite busy keeping up with the gardens and greenhouse!

When the students were living on site they utilized most of the garden produce. Now that they have moved out, we are left with a plethora of produce and an exciting opportunity! We have begun to market our produce to the faculty, staff, and students of Goshen College. Our first customers were those who live and work here at Merry Lea. Our weekly trips to the Learning Center were well received by all, especially the graduate students who live at Merry Lea. Despite a very positive response we were left with quite a bit of produce at the end of our sales each week. Although we continue our donations to the Wolf Lake food pantry, we decided to expand our market to those on the main campus of Goshen College.

We began our campus sales on August 26. We were expecting our customer base to be made up mostly of faculty and staff because most students had not yet arrived on campus. We were very pleasantly surprised, however, to find quite an interest among the student body! Our very successful first sale was quite encouraging and we look forward to our continued interactions with our campus customers every Friday from 2 to 5pm outside of the Schrock Science Annex.