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2013 Farm Shares, Going beyond Organic, Helping Hands
Long Life Farm
                                                                                                                                                                                                                    MARCH NEWSLETTER


2013 Long Life Farm Shares - 20 remaining 

Long Life Farm Shares available for 2013 season.  Pick up sites available in Hopkinton on Tuesday and Friday and in Ashland on Saturday.  There is also an opportunity to get a pick up site in Upton at A Little Common Sense at the Common. If we can get 5 shareholders for Friday we can deliver a bunch to the front porch of this wonderful community store.  You can download last year's share content to see what vegetables were in the bags each week. To reserve your share for 2013, print out the application and send in your deposit. You can find more detailed information here.  March has been a busy month for fund raising. Long Life Farm donated a 10 week share to the Friends of the Library and one lucky winner won. Welcome Pamela! The Friends of the library raised almost $800. Also this week the Long Life Farm Share for July and August was on the "hot items" list and earned the HPTA $160 in their annual auction.  Looking forward to meeting all our new shareholders that joined through giving to our community.    

Going Beyond Organic

Last month in the newsletter,  I explained why I believed it was important for Long Life Farm to file for organic certification. If you are new to LLF, see last months newsletter here.  My Organic Farm Plan and dossier was postmarked March 15 and already Baystate Organic Certifiers has reviewed the application.  Questions and answers have gone back and forth, additional documents submitted and now the file has gone to the inspector.  On April 9, the inspector will spend a part of a day with us to review our operation and our record keeping.  We are hopeful that by the time our first harvest takes place we will have approval.  :) 

As I mentioned organic certification is a process for growing, using crop rotation, cover cropping, organic seed and amendments, and avoiding synthetic fungicides, herbicides and insecticides.  Organic farming does not guarantee more nutrition in the produce. That is why we balance the minerals in our soil.  Our mission is to improve the quality of the food that we eat and grow it organically.  The USDA has been keeping nutrient content records of 20 vegetables since the 1920s.  Since that time the data shows a significant decline in the nutrients of these vegetables.  400 years of farming and weather have depleted the minerals in our soils, the last 100 years of conventional farming is when this decline has been most severe.  We build fertile soil by using a system outlined by Professor William Albrecht a soil scientist that farmed around the time of World War II.  The objective is to fix the soil minerals to a ratio of 65-80% Calcium, 5-15% Magnesium, and 2-5% Potassium. In addition, by using soil testing, we can fine tune the amount of trace elements like Boron, Manganese, Copper, Cobalt, Molybdenum, Silica and Zinc.  These minerals and trace elements are required for human and animal health and need to be in our food.  It is also critical to insure our soils are alive.  We need microorganisms like bacteria and fungi in the soil to help move the minerals and traces back and forth between the organic matter and the plants.  Feeding this soil biology is critically important and is one of the biggest difference between conventional and biological/organic farming.  When we started farming our two acre site on East Street, there were no worms or bugs in the soil, in other words, no life.  By the end of one season we had both,  and yesterday when I was over there checking the soil temperature, there were several dozen robins enjoying themselves on the smorgasbord of worms.   Bringing the soil back to grow nutritious crops does not happen overnight.  We estimate that after two years  of balancing the soil minerals, we will see good results and after four years, the plants should be able to protect themselves from insects and disease due to their healthy immune system. As the soil fertility improves, the plant is able to grow up to it's genetic potential and will yield more nutritious fruit as well as more yield.  Some believe that a tomato plant should yield 150 lbs of fruit per plant, most people do not get more than 20 lbs per plant.  Also did you know that a tomato plant should continue thriving and producing until the first frost? Most do not as they run out of energy and food due to depleted soil.  

How do we know that we have reached our goal of growing nutrient dense produce? Taste will be a major factor, nutrient dense food taste better.  I will also be measuring the fruit with a refractometer.  This is a device that is used by wineries to measure the fructose in grapes, it is called Brix.   I will use it in the same way to measure the fructose or Brix in the fruit as well as the leaves.  The leaf, when crushed and squeezed onto the refractometer can help monitor plant growth and health.   Another sign that our goal is near is when the plant is fighting off insect attacks.  Plants make carbohydrates through photosynthesis. When they have more carbs than they need to grow and produce fruit, they exude it through their roots to feed the soil biology, they also start forming complex carbohydrates and complex proteins.  At this stage very few insects are able to digest the plant, so they will go to another farm or die.  Once our fields have gone through four years of mineral balancing, I plan to take a few different vegetables to the lab and have nutritional testing done so that I can compare it to the USDA nutritional analysis that they keep. You will notice too that these vegetables do not rot in your refrigerator as quickly as some.  If stored properly leafy greens can last several weeks. They also withstand minor frosts when other vegetables don't.  I had chard in the front garden until beginning of February that looked really good considering the cold and snow.  In fact it is growing now, it just won't give up.  

If any of you are interested in nutrient dense vegetable growing for your own backyard, my teacher Dan Kittredge will be at the Unitarian Church in Hopedale on April 19 at 7:00pm.  His talk on Quality Food: What is it? is brought to us by the Bionutrient Food Association free of charge.  
Laura Davis

Town Common Approved

The Hopkinton Parks and Recreation Department has granted us permission to use the Town Common for the farmers market!  The market will start Sunday, June 16, 1-5pm  and run for 19 weeks through October 20, 2013.  We will have all local farmers with hydroponic, organic and conventional produce, beef, pork, lamb and eggs, honey, bread, pasta, jams and pickles, and a whole lot more.  We still have plenty for new volunteers to help with.

Helping Hands

This Spring begins Laura Bogart's second season working at Long Life Farm. She earns her living substituting as a clerk at local libraries, which she hopes to turn into a full time position as soon as an opportunity opens. Both the farm and the library play into her larger life philosophy of compassion, community, and ecology. She began with vegetarianism at age thirteen, which eventually shifted into veganism with a large organic component. She volunteers with the Framingham chapter of the Transition Network to learn and do more to protect the environment through sustainable agriculture and other community projects. If she doesn't find a full time position by February, 2014, she intends to intern at Dancing Rabbit ecovillage in Missouri, learning how to build cob houses.  
 

Farmer Don

Usually Don helps write the newsletter,  but critical projects have taken priority. The walk in cooler will be cooling your produce come June. All the vegetables will enjoy drip irrigation this year as well.  This morning is the first time the soil was ready for bed preparation. Don uses a walk behind tractor called a BCS that was made in Italy.  He uses the tiller to break up any vegetation and the rotary plow attachment to make raised beds.  We will start transplanting the trays of scallions, onions, shallots, leeks, chard and kale from the greenhouse and direct seeding snap peas, radishes, turnips, spinach and Asian greens over the next few days. Let the planting begin.
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