We’re asking for some help from our community to fund infrastructure improvements on the farm. Due to our hilly plot, we rely on terracing to increase our growing space. Our current walls are made of loose stone collected from the land, as well as some smaller bamboo buffers, but these barriers are very susceptible to erosion and most need to be rebuilt every year.

Our infrastructure committee did some research on alternatives and made a pilot test of a gabion.

What is a gabion?
A gabion is a resilient wall made by filling metal cages with stones and other material like gravel, dirt, or sand. Because of their sturdiness, they are often used in landscaping and civil engineering — you may have seen them on the sides of highways or in other large-scale applications. But they are also inexpensive and relatively simple to build, requiring only metal mesh, metal wire, and stone (much of which can be found). In this case, modest fundraising can do a lot to improve Prospect Farm’s infrastructure.

How can our community help?
We are looking to raise $500 for materials to replace as many of our retaining walls as possible with gabions. The money will go toward the metal mesh plus possibly stone or other material to fill the cages if we can’t source enough from the farm. We plan to host workshops while building the walls to share this knowledge with the community. This will make Prospect Farm safer, more accessible, and more productive. We hope you will consider contributing to this effort — even donations as small as $5 will help us reach our goal.

Visit our fundraiser on GoFundMe to contribute!

We had our first work weekend of the year, spending a beautiful Saturday processing lots of compost and raking leaves away from all the bulbs coming up. Spring is really coming!

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Sunday morning started out with some heavy rain, so once that let up a little, our pruners got to work on our fruit trees. Last year was the first time we pruned them in both the spring and fall. Pruning in really important for encouraging the trees to produce fruit. We definitely saw a difference last year, so after a full pruning cycle, this year may be even better.

We also collected soil samples for testing and started planting! The past few years we have been planting our peas pretty late and not seeing very significant yields as a result. Peas can actually be planted a month before the average last frost, so we went for it, turning in some of the remaining snow in the bed. Judging from internet advice, the warmer, sunnier conditions this week should help the seeds get a jump start, even though there was still snow on the ground. We’re planning to plant additional rows every two weeks until summer.

And remember farmers: yellow strings on plants or beds means don’t pull it!

Prospect Farm members met for the annual planning meeting this weekend to kick off the 2019 growing season. We talked about making some changes to our composting system, triumphs and disappointments from last year, and picked the dates for our first work days. Weather willing, we’ll have a spring clean-up weekend March 9th and 10th!

If you are interested in being a part of Prospect Farm, right now is an excellent time to get involved and join a committee or two. The planting committee will be meeting soon to determine our spring schedule, we have our first event slotted for the end of April, and we have infrastructure projects afoot. Come to one of our work days or email prospectfarmbk@gmail.com for more info.

Cooler temperatures are definitely settling in with the arrival of fall. While our tomatoes are pretty much done, we’re starting to harvest squashes — both the butternuts we planted and the delicata that volunteered along the fence line. We have one more watermelon on the vine, plus peppers and eggplants still ripening. We’re trying to pull up all the morning glory we find along the fence, since it’s such a prolific seeder and takes over, binding the plants we want along the way. But it’s hard when it looks so pretty.

As we harvest and pull up spent crops, we’re starting to plant for cooler temps — arugula and spinach sowed by seed and brassicas started by seed for later transplanting. Coming next will be some cover crops and perhaps some winter planting experiments.

 

It’s been a hot, wet summer, and the farm is still pretty lush and green (except for the tomatoes and cucumbers which are getting a bit blighted). We are finally finding out what some of our mystery, volunteer vines are: we have a honeydew melon (hanging on the fence, supported by a plant pot) and some delicata squash. Our butternut squash is also doing fabulous, and we’ll have a few melons from the straw bale.

Sadly, all our zucchini succumbed to the vine borers yet again. Here’s one of the plants with the tell-tale slits. They are so frustrating because the plants look so healthy until they suddenly start dying — at which point it’s too late to save them. We will have to be more aggressive with our vine borer prevention if we decide to try zucchini squash again. Luckily the borers are less interested in butternut and other winter squashes!

Elsewhere around the farm, we are excited about our new terraced beds behind the compost bins, some beautiful amaranth, volunteer okra, and the new upper pathway on the hill.

 

We’ve been a little remiss in updating our website over the last month, but not for lack of developments at the farm. (Plus we’ve posted some shorter updates on our Facebook page.) It’s been a great season so far; we have a lot of healthy plants and are already harvesting many cucumbers and eggplants, with the tomatoes, green beans, and okra beginning to come in as well. We successfully dealt with some powdery mildew on the cucumbers but lost a squash and a watermelon to vine borers — happily we have plenty of others that made it through un-bored. Our farmers have been excellent trellisers this year, keeping cucumbers and tomatoes off the ground and less likely to become diseased.

Our infrastructure committee has also been keeping on top of necessary maintenance. After realizing how water run-off down the hill has been piling soil up behind the compost bins, Phil cleared a path behind the bins (using the excavated soil to re-level the seating area at the top of the hill). We picked up some donated concrete parking stops to construct a retaining wall. There are more improvements in process, including a new path to the top of farm. More pictures to come!

We are a few days away from the summer solstice, and it is kind of the best time of the year at the farm. (Aside from when we can start taking tons of tomatoes home.) Everything is blooming and fruiting, and it hasn’t been too hot yet, so only the most tender greens have bolted and been pulled up.We replaced most of them with three rows of bush beans. There are only a few signs of pests, so we are mostly watering and weeding and awaiting those summer harvests.

We are also playing a new game we’re calling “Spot the mullein.” Mullein is a member of the snapdragon family that is a biennial and flowers in its second year. We’ve never planted it (that anyone present today could recall), but it has popped up in four different places around the farm. It has many medicinal uses, the leaves are good for the lungs and respiratory issues in general, and oil from the flowers is traditionally used for ear infections. Ours are just starting to bloom, and we hope it will seed itself again.

We’re gradually nearing the point of the growing season where things start getting really exciting. While we’ve been harvesting some greens and strawberries, our peas are finally blooming and some of our hot peppers are about to flower as well. Two weeks ago we planted more cucumbers, beans, and vining flowers along the fence…

… and the beans have shot up the fastest of them all!

As of this weekend, we are pretty much all planted. We have a few spots available for some late finds, but we seeded our dedicated kale bed and our straw bales, so we have fulfilled our initial planting plan, including achieving our goal of doing more companion planting, like our raised bed with onions and scallions paired with lettuces.

This year we have two bales, one with melons (watermelons and cantaloupe) and one with squashes (we have an heirloom spaghetti squash and then a variety of zucchinis). We’ll be watching these for one of our biggest pest nemeses, the vine borer.