To celebrate the final day of the 2011 farming and harvest season, please come share hearty homemade soup with our Land's Sake friends at the Farm Stand on Wellesley Street. We will feature Land's Sake produce in the soups, and some will be vegetarian. Please bring your own favorite soup mug and spoon!

It's also Halloween Eve, so there may be some Jack-o-lantern fun, and any remaining pumpkins will be priced to move to your doorstep for the festivities as darkness falls.

Soupapalooza is free and the soup will be first come, first served, though we'll also encourage donations and farmstand purchases.

PS: We need volunteers to pitch in! If you would like to make soup (your great recipe or ours) or hoist a ladle, please send an email to info@landssake.org.

Soupapalooza Checklist:

• 12-2 pm on October 30
• Soup mug
• Appetite for super soup
• Funds (cash or check) for Land's Sake produce and products

Although our last day of the regular farm stand season will be Sunday, October 30th, we have decided that we will wake up the stand one last time in 2011 for a pre-Thanksgiving Sale on Saturday, November 19th from 10:30 a.m. to 3p.m.  Come visit us! 

We'll have:

• Our own delicious cold weather and storage veggies!  Turnips and parsnips might sound boring now, but come mid-November, when you've been missing the farm stand, they will be frost kissed, sweet and delicious!  Carrots, cauliflower, all kinds of fun root veggies, greens, leeks, winter squash and more. Stored properly, many of these veggies will last for months. 
• Sweet and delicious jams and preserves from Weston's own Pigeon Hill Preserves.
• Land's Sake's own honey.
• Land's Sake T-shirts and totes.
• Anisha Palmer's beautiful Land's Sake farm photo card sets--perfect as gifts!
• Pre-ordering for Farmer Hilary's beautiful holiday wreaths: local and handmade!
• 2012 Green Dollars will go on sale early this year! Purchase them as gifts for friends or family members to use next season!
• Free hot soup and cider!

Buy a Turkey, Support Land's Sake! 

Land's Sake is offering you the chance to purchase this year's bird from one of our favorite partners--Graze Delivered--and 10% of all purchases benefit us!  (Just enter promotion code LS10 at checkout).

Service Learning on the Farm 

Doug Cook, Education Director 

Take a look around the farm this fall and you will see a variety of improvements underway, many of them as a part of service learning experiences. Asa Phillips, as a part of his Eagle Scout Project,  led fellow scouts in the installation of our beautiful new split rail fence in front of the Education Garden. Gann Academy, one of our regular partners, returned this fall with twenty-four ninth grade students to help remove invasive species, weed our precious strawberries and build new raised beds in the Education Garden. This past weekend, in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, about forty people from young to old helped harvest several hundred pounds of our carrots. A giant thanks to everyone who has come out to help this season!  Your assistance helps make Land's Sake a special farm and a strong community.  

We would also like to announce two upcoming events: Thanks to a grant from the Foundation for MetroWest, Land's Sake has partnered with Weston Public Schools and the Massachusetts Farm to School Project to hold the Metrowest Farm to School Initiatives on October 24th and November 21rd from 3-5 pm at the Weston High School Media Room.   

The events will include two sessions that foster dialogues on the status of farm to school efforts in various Metrowest communities and school districts. School personnel, farmers, parents, teachers and community organizations will gather to present their programs involving composting, gardening, parent/student education, and procurement of farm-fresh food. A focus on the obstacles and successful strategies for advancing the farm to school program will enable attendees to share resources and investigate possibilities.  

The event is free and open to the public! We hope to see you there.  

Land Management & Community Preservation  

Jordan McCarron, Conservation Land Manager  

For a peek at Land's Sake's land management practices at their best, take a drive by the corner of Wellesley and Glenn Streets.  Notice anything different as you gaze over that beautiful stone wall and through sparse sugar maples and pines onto the old Danforth family hay field?  (Wait, there's a stone wall and a hay field there?!)  That's right folks-- we've beat back the invasive European Buckthorn, multiflora rose and poison ivy and restored that corner of Weston's history to its agricultural roots.  

 

Funded cooperatively by the Massachusetts Community Preservation Act, Weston's Conservation Commission and Land's Sake, our Field-Edge Restoration program has been a large success over the past few years.  At the 80-Acre Field near Hobb's Pond, the Dickson Meadow on Highland Street and now the old Danforth hay field, Land's Sake has eradicated encroaching invasive species and restored those pieces of conservation land to their original walled boundaries. 

Though these invasive species were brought over by our European ancestors (intentionally and unintentionally) hundreds of years ago, it is our responsibility now to manage their spreading.  Imagine a Weston without maple, birch and oak forests, without native wildflowers and grasses, without healthy wetlands.  If we leave the buckthorn, rose, poison ivy, purple loosestrife, phragmites and other invasive species to flourish uncontrolled, that will be our reality.  And it wouldn't take long, either.

Stay tuned for more news of Land's Sake's battle against invasive species and for opportunities to pull, saw, clip and cut this spring!