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.

There is so much going on in the agroecology department at Merry Lea but unfortunately it has been quite some time since anyone has routinely updated this blog. I have recently been hired as an intern in this department to be of aid to Dr. Dale Hess. One of my duties includes updating you on our activities.

So first off, here is a little about me: my name is Amy Hartzell and I am a 2009 graduate of Juniata College located in Pennsylvania. I grew up in western PA (just SW of Pittsburgh) but have spent time living in central PA and also western Washington. But enough about me! Here is what we have been up to here at Merry Lea:

This year's Agroecology Summer Intensive (ASI) began on June 6 with six enthusiastic participants. We are now in week seven of the program and I think that all of the students would agree that it has been a rewarding experience that has taught them quite a bit about sustainably growing their own food. They have finished their first two courses working with vegetable crops and soils, and are beginning courses in agroecology and small farm management.

However, don't be fooled into believing that these students spend most of their days in a classroom! They start each day growing a wide assortment of crops in the Merry Lea gardens and greenhouse at Rieth Village. Through weekly field trips to diverse local farms, the students have witnessed a variety of approaches to sustainably producing revenue for a family by providing healthy food to consumers.

Because our agroecology program continues to grow and develop, we are preparing more land to be farmed. In June, the agroecology field was fenced to keep out the local wildlife. Just last week, the students tilled and planted a portion of that field for the first time. The picture on the right shows Ross transplanting okra into the new field plot. Today, another expansion is under way! The hoophouse that used to stand at the farmstead was installed in its new location to the west of the greenhouse. This allows us to expand our protected growing area and thus lengthen the growing season. The picture below shows the students putting in the posts to support the hoophouse.

The ASI program is designed for students from a variety of backgrounds who have an interest in learning how to grow their own food, on some scale, in the future. This may be in the form of a window box or small garden plot to supplement food for themselves and their families or on a much larger scale of selling produce for a profit. It is so appropriate, then, that the students have had the opportunity to experience this process from start (tilling the new plot) to finish (harvesting and enjoying their own crops)!

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.