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Planting Perennial Polycultures
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Greetings!
This spring, we have been preparing, planting and harvesting in the solar greenhouse, building a tiny house, organizing courses,, hosting visitors from afar, teaching collaboratively, selling products at the Greenman Festival and living in community. As rain falls and spring edibles bloom, each day passes with new growth and color.
We reflect on the 9-day intensive edible forest garden design course and move forward to hosting and learning in the community herbalism course. Along with us in the journey and daily work of the farm are the farm interns, both couples, who share their stories and first experiences at Wild Meadows Farm.
For those who have yet to visit, we invite you to join us on Saturday, May 28th for a Farm Work Day on planting perennial polycultures to learn more about the interrelationships of plants and trees. The solar greenhouse has turned from brown to green and soon bright colors of various vegetables will make their debut into the summer heat!
Regeneratively,
Kim Walsh |
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Community Herbalism Course
Discover the lore, tradition, and science behind Appalachia's most popular and native medicinal roots, from the well known and economically exalted roots of the culture like Ginseng and Black Cohosh to the local secret favorites like Yellowroot and Stoneroot and many more! In this 3-day intensive certificate course, you will:
- Receive a certificate of community herbalism;
- Make salves, tinctures and other medicinal applications to bring home;
- Learn and expand your knowledge about regional medicinal plants.
To register and for more details, read on...
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Forest Garden Design Intensive 
We feel grateful that this event went so well. Despite the cold, wind and rain of April in Pennsylvania, thirty-five folks came together at the farm for nine days of in-depth sharing, learning and designing.
Design teams were formed during the first days when folks had just gotten to know each other but by the end of the course they were humming like bees in a hive as they came together and created detailed and well prepared forest garden designs on several scales, from urban to rural and in between. The energy that came to the farm as a temporary community formed is sorely missed. We hope that the connections made during this time will continue to ripple out. Our intern crew did an awesome job of cooking delicious wholesome and mindful meals and all the participants brought their own special talents that made for a very special nine days.
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Wild Meadows Participates in Science Day @ Everett Elementary
 | | By Jenifer Perry & Travis Boulden |
On Friday, May 13, we represented Wild Meadows at nearby Everett Elementary School's annual Science Day. During the day, presenters from across the local area came to the school to teach children about various science-related topics, including fermented foods, soil, agriculture, forestry and electricity. We chose the topic of beneficial insects and the ways they help protect crops.
Many children were excited to learn about honeybees and butterflies and participated with the knowledge they already had. In the groups that consisted of 4th-6th graders, they enjoyed the discussion and we enjoyed hearing all of the experiences that they had to share. One of the students even had beekeeping experience. The groups that were made up of Kindergarten through 3rd Graders enjoyed telling about all of their experiences too, but of course, it was also fun to see the live butterfly and try on the bee keeper's hat that came along as a prop.
All the students seemed to enjoy touching and feeding the earthworms most of all! It was a pleasant surprise that in each of the five sessions, everyone wanted to learn about the strange insect they did not recognize: the aphid. Did you know that an adult aphid can produce 12 nymphs per day, or about 80 per week? At that rate, aphids can take over an entire field in a matter of hours. It is a good thing that here on the farm there are more than enough ladybugs to keep up. Overall it was a fun day for both the teachers and the students, and it was a real joy for us to meet with the children as well as the other presenters. We are both look forward to participating in many other events during our stay at Wild Meadows Farm.
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Wild Meadows @ Greenman Festival in Greenbelt, MD
 | Michelle Kaplan & Ted Okun at Greenman Festival
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For the weekend of May 7th and 8th, we traveled to Greenbelt, Maryland for the annual Greenman Festival. We helped with a demonstration garden and sold edible perennial plants including currants, gooseberries, shiitake mushroom logs and many others. Our interns Michelle and Ted helped us in all aspects of the event from creating informational signs to loading the van. Here is an article they wrote to describe the journey that brought them to WMF... ********************************************************** A couple years ago we realized we wanted to get away from main stream culture and live a more alternative lifestyle. Since then we have been traveling around to different farms, communities, and homesteads learning the basic needs of life and more. More recently, we spent a couple months work-trading at Heathcote Community in Maryland and then left February 15th to check out a farm we had read about on WWOOFusa.org. That particular farm ended up not being a good fit so we needed to figure out another plan quick. Of all the many WWOOFing experiences we have had, this was our first time having to leave a farm so abruptly. We were bummed out because we had driven 2 1/2 hours out of our way into south central Pennsylvania.
The next day we called around to other farms in the area and after many discouraging calls got in touch with Mandy from Horn O' Plenty Farm, who suggested Joel and Kim at Wild Meadows Farm. So we talked to Kim on the phone and she said that she'd get back to us. At that point Michelle was feeling pessimistic and doubtful because it was so last minute. Ted said, " Let's keep a positive attitude; who knows, we might find a place we'll love and end up staying for the whole growing season." We drove into Bedford and instead of going to Hebrews Coffee we went to Green Harvest Cafe and thats when Kim called back! Surprisingly enough, she was right down the street at Hebrews. We joke now about how funny it would have been if we were also in Hebrews when she called. A little while later, Kim with her banjo in hand, came to meet us on a bench in town. We talked for a while, connected on many issues, and realized we share a mutual friend at Sirius Community. She invited us to come work on her farm for 2 weeks and see how things would work out.
We've committed to staying here until October, the whole growing season, which is really exciting! We've never stayed put at one farm for more than a couple months. It will be good for us to strengthen our connections and grow here. Just within the few months we've been here, Ted started a small-scale bread business, we've cooked for 35 people for a 9 day intensive forest garden course, we have helped build up the soil in the solar greenhouse by double digging, and we'll be involved in many more projects to come.
The moral of this story is to keep an open and positive mind, expect the unexpected, and remember that everthing will happen just as its supposed to.
Here is an article that was written up in our local paper back home on our 2010 west coast adventure. |
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Farm Work Day
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Join us in planting perennial polycultures! Polyculture is the "growing of more than one species or crop variety in a patch or space at one time; contrast with monoculture."
 The work day will start at 9:00 AM and those traveling from afar can come the night before to lodge in the house or camp out. RSVP to Kim at 814-839-4962! |
Solar Greenhouse Update  Perfection fennel, growing in the greenhouse, will be harvested at a baby size and sold through Tuscarora Organic Growers Coop. Many other crops have already been planted including heirloom tomatoes, leeks, artichokes, salad greens and ginger. We are in the process of setting up an online farmers market called bedford.locallygrown.net in order to serve customers directly.
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Double Digging Beds in the High Tunnel
 | | Pick, Shovel, Sift, Fill, Repeat |
Double digging is a technique used in Biointensive Gardening for bed preparation before planting. Biointensive methods requires humans to build soil, make compost, and grow ecosystems that provide an abundance of food.
Patrick Gibbs, a visitor to the farm created the above double digging time-lapse video.
For more information about Biointensive Gardening Methods, go here!
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You can now become a fan of WILD MEADOWS FARM on Facebook and receive updated information in a format that may best suit your networking preferences. We will continue to communicate via email but are pleased to offer yet another method to share information about upcoming events, discussion boards, photo albums, and much more. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions as we move the farm into the social networking arena.
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 WILD MEADOWS FARM is offering an exciting line-up of educational and community activities and events in 2011. Receive up-to-the-minute information by following WILDMEADOWSFARM on Twitter- an information sharing network. - Simply register at http://twitter.com
- Add WILDMEADOWSFARM as a friend and follow
- Choose how you wish to receive information (email, text message, rss feed)
And never again miss any of our educational and community events.
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