Heirloom Harvest

In Memoriam

The Heirloom Harvest community sends its condolences to the Cahill family and friends. We received the following note recently (reprinted here by permission of the Cahill family):

Greetings John, We are interested in renewing our farm commitment for next season. We share a share with the Cahill family and would like to have our pickup on Tuesday again, on site, as we did last year. I also wanted to update you regarding the Cahills. Kim Cahill, age 37, passed away January 12th after being diagnosed with bile duct cancer. She was diagnosed in November. Of note, she wanted to be buried at the St. Lukes cemetery because of its location next to the farm. She loved Heirloom Harvest for being a local farm and its commitment to the community and organic farming.

 

Earth Day, Earth

Heirloom Harvest celebrated Earthday 2006 from 1 to 4 pm on Sunday, April 23. The rain forced a change in our plans to walk the farm and pick up trash. Instead, those present filled peat pots and seeded in the barn in between education events that included a discussion of Oxfam's campaign to reform farm policy in the US, and a demonstration of how pollution affects groundwater.

Volunteer Chris Wright and Oxfam representative Stephanie Demmons work to fill peat pots and plant summer squash seeds.

Barb Harrington (left) from the Crystal Spring Center for Earth Learning gives a demonstration of how pollution from various sources—including a golf course, a factory, a housing development, a clearcut hillside, and a conventional farm—affects ground water.

Audience members participated in the pollution demonstration by playing the roles of the various facility owners on the model. Here, the "factory owner" is pouring effluent into his factory which flows out into a stream, which leads to a river and eventually to a lake and the wetlands where the water changes color from the pollution.
[We are indebted to Mark Fisette for the next three photos.]

Let's Call the Whole Thing Hot

Hopkinton resident and CSA member Kathy Mosher (left) came in with her daughter to help seed start Black Krim heirloom tomatoes, while Trish Stephanko transplants hot pepper seedlings at right.
Kathy is taking an organizational role in the effort in Hopkinton to establish a community farm on the 600 acres of Weston Nurseries land that is coming up for sale in that town. If you'd like more information about how to become involved in helping to preserve a significant portion of the 600 acre parcel for farming, contact Kathy at jkmosher@comcast.net.

Please note: Town water will not be turned on at the farmsite until around last frost in May, so please be sure to bring your own water bottles for drinking water, as the greenhouse can be as hot as 90-plus degrees even when it's only in the 50s outside.

Update on Travis

As many of you may already know (perhaps from last year's blog entry), the older son of Heirloom Harvest assistant manager Trish Stefanko is serving in Iraq right now.

Private First Class Travis Weiner (pictured here (middle) tying tomatoes at the farm last summer) is serving with the 101st Airborne with an Air-Assault Team near Baghdad. In recent action about two weeks ago Travis was hit in the neck by mortar shrapnel as his unit was leaving an area they had just cleared in a eight-humvee convoy. Travis was not nearly as badly injured as some other soldiers in his unit, and he assisted giving first aid to some very badly injured men.

Travis spent some time in recovery and has now returned to duty, though the doctors decided not to remove the shrapnel from his neck. Travis will be returning home in mid-April for a two week leave and has said he would love to attend a Red Sox game. His mother Trish has heard tickets are hard to get, and wanted me to post a request if anyone had tickets that they could donate or sell to her during the time Travis is in town, she would be grateful.

Her email is trish8588@verizon.net.

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.

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.

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

Deep in the Leeks

At the Fall Equinox, Renée Moelders captured images of her son, Moritz, and a leopard frog among the leeks. As she points out, the leeks look like a jungle when seen from Moritz's perspective. The frog might well feel the same way, on the damp earth under lots of leeks to keep him moist.

Music for toddlers

Heirloom Harvest CSA member Sharon Goldstein is teaching a music for toddlers and their parents class, ages 15 months to 3 years,  at the Westborough Jewish Community Center.
Sharon describes the class as follows: “Music brings children to life!  You and your toddler will sing, chant, move, dance, listen and play simple instruments in a nurturing environment. Music stimulates so many areas of your child’s development: language, self expression, social interaction, motor skills, creativity, bonding, emotional growth and so much more.”
The class runs for 12 weeks from October through January, Tuesdays, 9:30-10:10 am. Contact Sharon at 508-435-7951 or email sharon@twin-islands.com.

Drumming in autumn

Solar ovens were set up at the Fall Equinox celebration to make solar-heated s'mores.

Joshua Fecteau helps bring in the irrigation pipe for winter storage at the Fall Equinox celebration.

At the Fall equinox, members sang, drummed and played various instruments along to renditions of John Denver's "Country Road" and Woody Guthrie's "This Land is your Land..."

Several CSA members helped move pipe from the field to the barn during the Fall Equinox celebration.