Heirloom Harvest

Westborough organic farm holds first Earth Day celebration

Heirloom Harvest will host an afternoon on the farm of education, advocacy and action in celebration of Earth Day on Sunday, April 23, from 1 to 4 pm.

The farm is located along Route 135 in Westborough, behind and adjacent to Saint Lukes’ Cemetery at 30 Hopkinton Road. The farmers will be joined by the Dominican sisters in residence at the Crystal Spring Earth Education Center of Plainville, who will do a demonstration for children of how pollution contaminates drinking water.

Oxfam US organizer Stephanie Demmons will be present to discuss the 2007 farm bill,  and how residents can send a message to improve the farm bill to better support small farms in local communities in the U.S. and abroad. Volunteer Family Inc., a nonprofit community service organization with a mission of strengthening the role of families in providing service to the community, will send volunteers to help with cleanup around the farm, as well as some of the farmwork. Members of the public are welcome.

“Oxfam is working to shift funding in the 2007 Farm Bill to support sustainable, diverse and equitable agriculture and rural development programs here in the U.S.,” says Stephanie Demmons, a regional Oxfam organizer. “Oxfam is concerned that the current emphasis on commodity subsidies fuels consolidation and continued overproduction of commodities that harm farmers both here and in developing countries.”

The first Earth Day was celebrated nationwide on April 22 in 1970. It was observed in hundreds of communities and on the campuses of thousands of schools, colleges and universities. Many important environmental laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day according to Wikipedia, the online information source, including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect drinking water, wild lands and the ocean. The EPA was created within three years of the first Earth Day.

Heirloom Harvest is a community supported agriculture farm. Community supported agriculture is an innovative approach to the relationship between farmers and those who enjoy good food. With a preseason payment, members purchase a “share” of the season's harvest, a varied assortment of seasonal vegetables each week from early June through November. Though the farm is under private management, it has an educational mission and a program to donate food to charity. For more information,  call 508.963.7792, or visit the farm’s Web site.

The Hero is the Goat

This year we will be selling goat cheese. We’ll be selling 6-ounce logs and it will come in six different flavors. People will be able to buy it right at the pickup. It will cost $5.50 and will come in plain, black pepper, chive garlic, basil, cranberry orange and Australian ginger. Get ready for some great opportunities with spring veggies! There’s a lot of things you can do with goat cheese and leeks, like Goat Cheese and Leek Galette and Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes. Or consider an onion and goat cheese mixture on a pizza or in a savory tart .

Mark your calendar!

We hope to have an Earth Day weekend event Sunday, April 23, to have a family volunteer and work day. We’ll be working with a family nonprofit organization whose mission is a giving families a chance to come out and work together. Also, there will be a speaker from Oxfam who will discuss the importance of small farms and advocating making some changes in farm bill to make it less commodity focused and more focused on small and sustainable farms.

Better than the beach for Spring Break

Ian Foertch, home for Spring Break from Sterling College in Vermont, will return this summer for his second season as a farmhand. He is getting a head start this week by taking a training intensive on the operation of a diverse assortment of farm machinery, from auto-seeders to cultivating tractors.

Here, he is  spreading lettuce seed over the vacuum holes on the seeder plate of an auto-seeder (Editor's Note: Something like this, I think). When all the vacuum holes have grabbed a seed, he will carefully pour off the excess, then flip the plate over soil blocks. When he shuts off the vacuum the seeds will fall precisely into place in the center of the soil blocks. He will then use a dowel to set the seeds to the proper depth, and finish by pinching a small amount of soil over them.

lettuce
sterlingcollege

Bold Brassicas

The greenhouse season has started at Heirloom Harvest. Pictured here are several thousand brassica seedlings ready for greenhouse transplanting into individual cells. We choose the best of the seedlings  to be moved into individual cells packs. Pictured here are green and red kale, collards and green cabbage.

Worms' Turn

Heirloom Harvest members  and farmer John Mitchell joined with participants at the Crystal Spring Center for Earth Education to celebrate the Spring Equinox. Here, Dominican sister Barb coaches some kids who played the role of worms in an educational play. Behind her on the chalkboard is a rousing song about compost that is sung during the play—to the tune of "Take me out to the Ballgame..."

compost
Spring Equinox

In: Progress

The greenhouse is up and running, and has been since February 15. We have all of our first plantings up, which means King Richard leeks, the Walla Walla sweet onions, mercury red onions, champion collard greens and the Elsa Craig sweet onions. We will get things in the ground probably around the first week of April. That will probably be peas, collards and kale, and maybe some lettuce.

Velocity Raptors

The land around the farm is a public commons, where people come to enjoy a variety of activities. Some are familiar, such as bike riding and nature walks. Others are less so, such as exercising falcons, as Upton resident Bill Johnston is getting ready to do here. One of these raptors was raised by its parents, and so is quite sensitive to the presence of people. The other was raised by humans from 21 days of age, and is consequently far more tolerant of people.