Life on an organic farm is.... Dirty! Every day I pick the dirt out from my fingernails and watch the dirt continuously depart from my clothes....

Today concludes my fifth full day working at Maplewood Organics. Operating this farm includes Hannah and Eric Noel, along with their children Maddie, 5 and Calvin, 2. Grass feed, free ranged cattle, mostly including Galloway and Angus, free ranged chickens, and an enormous variety of certified organic vegetables are the products of this family run farm. With the help of myself, Ellyn and Eric, live in interns and farm hands, we all grow the vegetables and tend to the animals in order for Maplewood to deliver to it's weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members.

In short terms, Community Supported Agriculture acts as a way for members of a community to directly support local farms. People buy shares and recieve a weekly box of delicious and fresh food. Each week, the food can variey depending on what's ready to be harvested. It's a great way to support local farms, and recieve the freshest food around, considering that the average food consumed by Americans takes over 1,500 miles to be shipped from the farm to the kitchen table! Many times that food stops at factories to be processed. Buying CSA shares guarentees clean, pure food grown in a way less environmentally damaging.

This morning, Ellyn, Hannah and Suzzie, a CSA member helping out, and I covered the cabbage in the field with a floating row cover. It's a thin white cloth that protects the cabbage from cabbage moths. The sheet was 250 feet long and didn't even cover two of our three rows of cabbage! Cabbage moths lay their eggs in the cabbage plants, and as soon as the eggs hatch, the larva begin to eat away at the cabbage. Hannah explained these little white moths to us yesterday as we were planting, and sure enough, when I headed out of the field after hours of planting cabbage, what do I see but a little white moth hovering over the rows of freshly transplanted cabbage....

After the cabbage Ellyn and I climbed up the massive pile of compost to weed. I never realized that you would need to weed through your compost, but weeds do grow, and will expand their roots in the compost if you don't tend to it. So gardeners who compost, make sure you weed! We used Action Ho's. They work great at lifting up the weeds. After the weeding we picked some rubarb for a pie which tasted amazing after a long day at work!

Stay tuned for more updates from up here in Highgate!