Garden Camp Week 4: The Food Cycle

 What do collecting seaweed for mulch, picking up and tossing rolly pollies out of your greenhouse, and feeding your leftover salad to worms have in common?

These activities are all part of the food cycle, the endlessly repeating cycle of nutrients through soil, plants, and our bodies. Today at Garden Camp we got to enact pretty much every important stage of that cycle: sowing seeds, preparing soil with compost, transplanting seedlings, weeding and otherwise tending to our crops' wellbeing, harvesting, eating, and composting our food waste, which will become new soil for the seeds we sowed!

Sowing

We began the day by sorting seeds into two groups: those that are best sown directly, and those we want to start in soil blocks! We sowed lettuce, swiss chard, scallions, and kale in soil blocks, and set carrots and beets aside for seeding directly into beds.

Midmorning we had a special guest! Bec Poole, our friend and local historian/art teacher, came to tell us all about Minerva Cutler's worm farm at what is now David's Folly Farm. Ms. Poole worked for Ms. Cutler when she was just twelve years old, weighing and packing up worms to ship to gardeners and fishers around the state and country! She described how a purple-clad Minerva would pick up a whole bunch of worms at once, smell them, and say, "Thank goodness for worms." We learned that if you feed the worms the right food (no meat, and nothing too acidic, like vinegar), and not too much, worm compost will never smell bad because they eat up your food waste right away and turn it into castings, an excellent (and apparently pleasant-smelling) fertilizer for our crops.

Captivated audience

Showing Ms. Poole our baby worms!

After saying goodbye to Ms. Poole, we moved on to preparing our former lettuce bed for Brassica seedlings planted by Garden Club in early June: kale, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and broccoli. First we had to harvest the lettuce and clear out the weeds. Then we had to loosen up the soil with a digging fork. Finally, after adding some compost for a nutrient boost, we carefully tucked our seedlings into the ready soil.

And remember that new bed we filled with soil and fertilizer? We transplanted an abundance of flower seedlings into it with Annie!

You might be wondering what we did with the lettuce heads we harvested to make room for the brassicas. Check it out: we donated them to the Magic Food Bus! The Magic Food Bus is a free mobile farm stand that serves local, fresh produce around the peninsula to anyone who would like it. This year, there is a new Brooksville stop! Every Thursday at 5:30 at the Town Office, Anna sets up an array of delicious vegetables, all grown by peninsula farmers, and shares the bounty (plus a selection of books!) with anyone who stops by. So this week, people in Brooksville can take home the lettuce we grew. 

Thanks to our gardeners for sharing the harvest with their community, and to Ms. Poole for sharing her knowledge about Brooksville's history with us. See you next week!