Earth Dance, Week #6

Wednesday

May 19, 2010

We started out planting herbs.  Mark and I planted the thyme, and then Mark went with Norm to tear down a fence and put new posts in.

Bushra planting sage.

Got to meet Matt who started on Monday, May 17th.  He is a philosophy major at La Crosse and is from Rochester (Elton Hills).  He went to Lourdes High School.  He wants to do his Master's degree in organic farming, and he definitely wants to farm organically some day.  His Dad and brother are both engineers at IBM.  Matt volunteered at Earth Dance for one week last year, and Norm liked him and hired him on for this whole season as an intern.  He's a happy, funny guy.  As soon as he met me, he gave me the name, "Wednesday Special!"  I got quite a kick out of that.

Norm, telling Matt and Mark that the old sage patch needs to be weeded.

Bushra and Matt planting marjoram.  Love the new hat, Bushra!

Bushra taking rosemary plants out of their pots to be planted.

Thyme seedlings.

Marjoram seedlings.

Rosemary seedlings.

Sage seedling.

After planting all the herbs, Mark rejoined us, and we weeded the old sage patch.  The picture above is looking back at the morning's work.

Mark putting everything away before lunch.

At lunchtime, I checked out the chicks!

I also peeked in the greenhouse...there's lots left to plant!

Here are the tomatoes I planted from seeds on my first day (April 14th).

After lunch, both the guys went with Norm to continue the fence post job.  Bushra and I mulched the herbs that we had planted this morning.  It was starting to get hot, and I lent Bushra a spare long-sleeved shirt, because she felt like she was getting too much sun.

Next, Bushra and I weeded in the strawberry patch.  It was hard to move too fast, because it was in the 80s by now.

Norm took a break from working with the guys and came and picked Bushra and I up in his pickup, along with Adriana, and he took us up to see the Shiitake mushrooms.  He had just picked a basket of asparagus, and we were eating it raw...it was very tender and tasty!

He had just been up to see the mushrooms before he came to get us and had picked this basketful.

Up behind the horse arena, just inside the edge of the woods is where he grows his Shiitakes.  Holes have been drilled in these logs, where the spores are placed and covered with wax.  It then takes a few years for these mushrooms to grow.

Close-up of Shiitakes.

Norm drove us back down to the house, and Bushra and I finished weeding our rows of strawberries.  Next, we went up to the rhubarb patch to weed.  On our way, I got to see where they had planted the rainbow chard (above).  They're so tiny now.

Riley showed up after school and started weed whipping the raspberries.  Bushra told me she had tightened up the strings for the raspberries since the last time I was here.

We could hardly see the rhubarb plants when we started weeding, and this is what it looked like after we cleared the weeds around each plant.

Bushra strikes a pose.

: )

It's 5:00...our work day is done.  Stopped and petted the horses on our way down.