June Update

by Melissa

Lilies bundled for market

The farm has a new name! Well, it is not so different than the old name, but since it is now separate from the First Fruits Produce Co. store/café, it was decided that it would be called the First Fruits Farm. Now, the labels for the bags of produce at market look a little different!Speaking of the market, one of the ways we sell the produce is at the Farmer’s Market in Urbana on Saturday mornings from May through November. My children and I have been out at the farm the last two Fridays helping pick and prepare the produce for market. We have picked and bagged lettuce, kale, broccoli raab, broccoli and some herbs. Wes said that zucchini should be ready next week. Caroline and Jonathan are very good kale pickers and the kale looks so nice. The leaves are either a grey/green color or red/purple color and they are curly looking, so when we bag them, they look really nice in the bag. And also, I took some home to eat and it is very tender and mild. It is a great green because it is full of vitamins! Broccoli Raab is a very strong tasting green - I don’t really like it, but I guess customers at market do!

Bagging broccoli and cauliflower

This week was the first broccoli, and even some small cauliflower! It all looks very nice. We are also harvesting some root crops, like radishes, kohlrabi and turnips. The turnips are white and when we wash them, they actually look pretty because they are pure white and almost perfect circles. Stacy and I were washing them one day and she told me this humorous story from one time that she had been working at market. She said that customers like to buy the turnips for the greens as well as for the turnip’s root part and that they ask for only the greens, but we sell the whole plant. So one day, these two ladies were buying turnips and one heard the other ask if we had only the greens. The one lady heard and since she only wanted the root, they split the cost and both got the part they wanted!

I spent quite a bit of time cutting down flowering chives so that they will grow nice stalks again. In the process, Pavlina needed half a pound of good ones for a restaurant order. Some of the children helped sort out the good ones from the woody and flowering stems. They worked really hard and then they came to me and asked, "Does this look like half a pound?" I really didn’t know, so I said, "Go weigh it." They came back from weighing it and said, "It’s only one-fourth of a pound." You could hear the groan in their voices! But they diligently went back to work and sorted until they had enough. It is amazing how much you need to make half a pound when it is greens!

This week, the radishes were big, but still very tender, spicy and crisp. They are red, purple and white, so looked really nice rubber-banded in bunches.

Bibi comes out to the farm every Friday and one of her specialties is picking the edible flowers - right now there are pansies and calendula. She picks the perfect looking ones and packages them in clear containers. The bright colors look beautiful. I could just see them decorating someone’s gourmet salad or topping a cake!

Stacy recently planted the fall mums in pots. Her girls and my girls helped put dirt in the pots and then put the plants in. These mums will grow in the greenhouse all summer and be those gorgeous flowers we see in the fall. They weren’t looking very good last week and Pavlina found out that mums don’t like their leaves to get wet when they are watered, so she has been careful to water only the dirt. We are learning things all the time about plants and their certain preferences!

Pavlina asked me to plant nasturtiums, another edible flower, and they went in two beds where the dirt looks very plain - not rich at all. She said that nasturtiums like poor soil. I learned something! I thought about how interesting that was. You know, God made so many plants so different, so unique and something will grow anywhere. No matter what we think of ourselves, even if I feel that I am quite poor, God has a perfect gift, a plant, if you will, that will flourish in my life if I nurture it. If we don’t purposely plant or allow God to plant in our hearts, weeds will grow - something WILL grow. Just as we have heard so many times, let us not let just anything grow in our hearts, but let us cultivate the character traits that we want there, because if we don’t, something else WILL grow.

There is now a part of the farm that we call the children’s garden! Mr. Craig Chattic is overseeing this project and children have done the planting. They have put in vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplant. They are weeding it and will also do the harvesting of the produce.

We had another unique event take place on the farm. Some school children took a field trip there! They were from Next Generation Summer Camp in Champaign and Pavlina spent about an hour and a half in the morning with an older group, around 18 second or third graders, and an hour and a half in the afternoon with a younger group, about 27 kindergarten or first graders.

She really enjoyed giving them a tour of the farm. She started at the greenhouses, showing them how we plant the seeds in the flats, keep them watered and then the seeds come up. When they are big enough, they are transplanted to the outdoors. She took them to the hoophouse and showed them how spinach grows and the kids made comments like, "Yuck, spinach!" They also saw the lettuce growing in there. Pavlina said that the highlight for the kids was when she turned on the sprinkler system in the hoophouse and it began to water all the beds. Can’t you just hear all those little ones oohing and aahing? She then took them to see the chickens and how the egg layers look different than the meat chickens. The layers are a rusty brown color and the meat ones are white. They also toured the fields and saw the rows of broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, etc. They saw how broccoli grows. Pavlina said that the kids were so interested and it was fun to show them how these foods they eat actually grow. They were very impressed. They got to plant some green beans out there in the dirt. The beans are planted in black plastic, so the kids were shown how to poke a hole in the plastic and push the seed down into the dirt. It was interesting to end up with crooked rows and holes in all these different places in the plastic. But the kids had fun! Each one got a cup of dirt to pour a little over the bean seed they planted, then were given a seed to plant in their cup to take home. They also got a little chocolate for a reward for helping plant. The littler ones were so cute, Pavlina said. One little girl asked, "May I please have one for my sister?" Then all the kids began to ask for one for their sister or brother and one piped up and said, "May I have one for my aunt?" They saw how a rototiller works and how it is used for tearing up weeds in between the rows and the different pieces of equipment for farming. They saw the children’s garden, too. After that, they left on the bus. The following Saturday, Pavlina said one of the mothers came to market and said that her daughter told her everything about the farm - and the daughter had been one of the quietest kids.

The men from Jesus is the Way Prison Ministries have been very diligent about coming out and working. They have been doing a lot of the harder "man" jobs, like spreading straw for mulch, weeding and putting up posts for staking tomatoes. They have kept up with mowing and weed-wacking and the farm looks nice and neat because of that.

We are inviting brethren to join in the farm work. There is not a lack of work to do. If you feel God wants you to be a part, then come. We want to encourage the gifts and talents that you have if you want to be a part. Please consider before the Lord what your part might be - monetarily or otherwise. We would appreciate your prayers for everyone involved with the farm. I spent quite a bit of time with Pavlina on Friday and she was so glad for the work week to be over. She is not complaining, but I see the work load has been huge.

I look forward to sharing with you in the future what is happening here in Mahomet, out in that wonderful dirt on the farm!