Green Gal

This afternoon in the Farm Garden, I led a Garden Talk on my new favorite flower: Lavender! Everyone currently working in the Farm Garden took turns last week and today presenting for 10-12 minutes each on garden topics of our choice. Other apprentices shared about topics like quail, African and African-American traditional foods and crops, compost worms, the impact of colonialism and forced removal on Native American traditional foodways, the "Language of Flowers" and their meanings, mycorrhizal fungi, and more! I chose lavender because I've been collecting and drying bunches of lavender in my tent cabin for a few weeks, and as I learned more about its uses, I was blown away by its incredible range of uses, both medicinally, culinary, and beyond. I've adapted my presentation into a blog post to share with you all below. In addition to presenting on lavender, I also brought some different lavender varieties, books with recipes and information, lavender essential oil...

Life on the Farm has been so busy lately! Our twice-weekly market cart began a few weeks ago, which means that on Tuesday and Friday mornings, we begin harvesting flowers, veggies, and berries at 7:30am for our market stand at the base of campus. Two of my lovely fellow apprentices load flower bouquets into the box truck to go to our market cart around 10:00am on harvest morning. We harvest flowers and make bouquets in the Farm Garden that are sold at our cart. We also harvest veggies to sell at cart. Other garden/farm sites in the program make bouquets or harvest veggies for our CSA program. My chore rotations lately (dish patrol and kitchen patrol) have also been more time consuming; they included setting up our post-meal dish station, drying and putting away dishes, putting away food from meals, and washing dishes used to serve food. I was also on a subrotation for three weeks focused on propagation in the greenhouses and hardening off tables. Along with three other appre...