Green Gal

It's been almost 3 months since I said goodbye to my beautiful farm-ily and graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Farm Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture. Life since then has been a whirlwind of organizing to-do lists and timelines, adjusting to more screen time, balancing new responsibilities and projects without the structure of a 9-5 job, and reflecting on this past growing season of learning, growth, and community. Since October when I packed up my tent cabin overlooking Monterey Bay and closed a profound chapter of my life, the ideas that had sprouted into dreams and were woven into goals during my time at the UCSC Farm soon became integral to the fabric of my daily life. The vision I crafted as I dug potatoes and planted ranunculus and cooked meals for 45 of my favorite people has begun manifesting as tangible stepping stones into the future, each leading to deeper understanding of the purpose and potential of those dreams. No doubt, I have days when fear makes m...

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...

Today we bottled our first batch of homebrewed beer, an American Pale Ale. You can read about our experience brewing it a few weeks ago here . The first thing we did was read the directions that came with our kit from Brewer's Best, which told us to boil two cups of water and then add the 5 oz of priming sugar that came with our kit. We boiled the sugar water for five minutes, and then added it to our bottling bucket, which we had sanitized with StarSan earlier. Everything has to be sanitary for brewing beer to go well, so we had Star San on hand throughout the entire bottling process. Priming sugar is used when bottling beer to create some fermentation to occur inside the capped bottle which causes the beer to become carbonated. Then we popped the lid off of our fermenting bucket. The smell of beer emanated from this dark liquid--our beer! First we siphoned the beer from this fermenting bucket into our bottling bucket.    We left behind the trub, or nasty hops and ...

"We can become creators of a better world, of better and more sustainable food choices, of greater awareness of resources, and of community based upon sharing. For culture to be strong and resilient, it must be a creative realm in which skills, information, and values are engaged and transmitted; culture cannot thrive as a consumer paradise or a spectator sport. Daily life offers constant opportunities for participatory action. Seize them." - Sandor Katz, The Art of Fermentation Last Monday evening, I combined equal parts flour and water into a bowl and mixed them into a thick paste. I knew they were equal parts because I weighed them on a small digital scale I recently purchased specifically for that purpose. I set the bowl's lid on top of its rim, slightly ajar so that air could get through, and placed it on the table near our home's central heater. The next evening, around the same time, I weighed out equal parts water and flour, added them to the mixture, a...