As we approach the final week of the summer intensive, the season of transition has been accompanied by a whirlwind of activities: field trips, harvesting produce, visits from friends, writing papers, and impending goodbyes. Meanwhile, the Rieth Village landscape has been transitioning in its own way. The prairie has…
Weeks 3 and 4 of ASI have really flown by. The three of us have really grown closer to each other and have likewise gotten to know Dale and Jon quite well. Each morning we start out with a good 2 hour session of garden work which can be…
Once again, June in northeast Indiana is upon us. Here at Merry Lea Sustainable Farm, life is abundant. Transplanted tomatoes are acclimatizing to their new outdoor homes just in time for the annual wave of crabgrass, volunteer buckwheat, and Colorado potato beetle instars to emerge. The compost pile teems…
Although our campus stand is closed for the year, our supply of stored produce has allowed us to continue sales through email orders. Students and staff were given the opportunity to order any of our remaining potatoes, onions, chard, and popcorn that were then delivered to the customer’s office…
October 1 found me ten days into my trip to West Africa. I spent a week each in Niamey, Niger, and Bamako, Mali, visiting friends as well as former colleagues with the West and Central African Programs of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a…
If the long, dry summer had a negative influence on the agroecology fields, one would hardly know it from the plentiful September harvest. We easily provided produce for weekly sales on the Goshen College campus as well as to various public programs. Many students and faculty came to buy…
The agroecology students are gone! Not only do we miss their fun personalities, we also regret the absence of their capable hands for the many tasks at hand! The chickens made the move from the Farmstead barn to the Rieth Village chicken tractor. Sluiceway, the farm cat, found them…
The final week of the summer intensive has arrived! We were grateful for a quarter inch of rain on the last day of July, Tuesday, a day that also saw the arrival of 15 day-old chicks destined for our chicken tractor. We installed them under a heat lamp in…
Week seven of the ASI dawned warm and dry, the trademark of this summer. We attended to some of the familiar herbivores of our cucurbits, the infamous squash bug (Anasa tristis), finding and removing egg masses from crop leaves and killing the insects when we could. We also detected…
While each of us might be here for different reasons, we are all enjoying dealing with the issues of food: where it comes from, what kind is best, how to raise it, and of course, how to eat it. We are interacting with each other around all of these…
