Our new goat yard has certainly created a buzz in Lexington…first an article in the Minuteman on Thursday and today an article in the West section of today’s Boston Globe.

Are you interested in visiting and learning more?

Contact us here and spread the word!!

Here’s what Lauren Yaffee had to say about her experience at the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference this year. Lauren manages Meadow Mist Farm,  a wonderful small farm in Lexington.

“When the second week in August rolls around, my thoughts typically turn to the NOFA Summer Conference.  This year, as a result of a most generous scholarship funded by The Lexington Community Farm Coalition, I was able to attend the full three days of the conference.

FRIDAY
Four of us piled into a small car and were on our way to UMass in Amherst, the location of the Summer Conference.  On arrival we were handed a bound book of over one-hundred and sixty pages of general information about the lectures, workshops, animal power field days, films, the summer country fair, a silent auction, conference entertainment, exhibitors, presenters, and keynote speakers.

Needless to say, the problem became how to choose from all of this interesting and useful information.  Some smart folks brought tape recorders to record one speaker while sitting down and listening to another! My first selection was “Growing Salad Greens All Year.”  This was taught by Lynda Simkins, a farmer of over 30 years.  She spoke about winter growing inside several greenhouses at the Natick Community Farm.  She shared one of her mottos, “There should be no naked soil.”

The next class was “How to Start a CSA,” taught by Carolyn Llewellyn of Sun Valley Farm in Mahwah, New Jersey.  She covered twenty different topics, emphasizing the need to be highly organized, to be prepared for all sorts of unexpected problems, and to enjoy people and have patience for them. Llewellyn emphasized that starting a CSA is not for beginner farmers. You should have every intention of staying with your business for many years and being a treasured part of the community. Friday night closed with the keynote address by Eric Toensmeier. Eric spoke about planting and growing perennial agroecosystems, using both forests and farms, and growing perennial staple crops as a way to keep farm land and the environment healthy by restoring degraded land, sequestering carbon, while provided livelihoods for farmers.

SATURDAY
On Saturday, farm manager Dan Kaplan of Brookfield Farm in Amherst Mass, offered his advanced class on CSA management.  Budgets, tracking payments, printing financial reports, planning for infrastructure improvements, and evaluating the overall financial status of the farm were all covered in depth.
After that was “Biodynamic Practical Applications” by Mac Mead, Director of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Bio-Dynamics in Woolwine, Virginia.  Mr. Mead talked about some of the biodynamic preparations that are applied to the tilled fields and the compost pile.  He gave an introduction to reading the biodynamic planting calendar, to raised beds, weed management, the beneficial use of fungi, disease and pest management.
Saturday’s last class for me was “Profitability Specialty Crop Production” offered by Michael Kirkpatrick of Kilpatrick Family Farm in Saratoga.  He showed slides and spoke about growing specialty crops such as ginger, artichokes, kohlrabi, parsnips, sweet potatoes, celeriac, garlic, strawberries, French beans, okra, squash blossoms, peppers, spinach, kale, leeks, pumpkins, and many different kinds of tomatoes using a grafting method.
Saturday night’s Keynote address was given by Ignacio Chapela an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley and Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Center for Biosafety. He has advised national governments and multilateral institutions on policy making on genetic engineering and sovereignty over genetic resources. He spoke in great detail about policy making in regards to genetically engineered food. He has been featured in several films including The Future of Food.

SUNDAY
Sunday morning I attended a course on Small Fruit given by Julie Rawson and Jack Kittredge of Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre, MA.  They discussed growing all of the various types of berries on a farm including blueberries, strawberries, red raspberries, gooseberries, elderberry, grapes how to care for them, how to prune them, when to harvest them soil fertility and how to enjoy eating them.
Finally, there was a great field trip to Simple Gifts Biological Farm in Amherst, run by Jeremy Plotkin.  He supplies 350 CSA members on 15 acres using nutrient dense and biological methods. He used soil drenches and foliar feeds seed inoculations and uses crop rotation to achieve this purpose.
I want to thank everyone at LexFarm for making this weekend a reality for me.  NOFA conferences are places to learn the nuts and bolts of sustainable agriculture, and to make wonderful new friendships.  Even if you don’t live or work on a farm, NOFA is an organization worth checking out. ” – Lauren Yaffee, Meadow Mist Farm

First, on Thursday we had about 20 kids and their parents visiting Waltham Fields Community Farm for a Kids Farm Tour.  We separated into two groups according to age: I decided to hang out with the littlest ones. We learned about the “Fab Five” things that plants need to grow (can you name all five?), made hummous that included fresh-picked cucumbers, and did some planting in the Learning Garden.

Today, I met about 35 adults and kids down at Busa Farm and we helped harvest potatoes. There were very few people who knew what a potato plant looked like, so we had a fun time trying to identify all the wonderful vegetables, until Jane led us to the potatoes. For their hard work, everyone got to take home a half-lunchbag of potatoes.

“The fields are filling up with spectacular greens and many of them are being harvested. Peas are flowering now and beets are on the way. Tomatoes, squash, onions, eggplant, flowers, and more are being transplanted into the beds, seed potatoes are in the ground – it’s a very busy time of year.

The greenhouses and the area around the stand are overflowing, positively gushing with color in the beautiful variety of flowering and ornamental plants–annuals, perennials, ornamental grasses,
hanging petunias, and more–gracing the benches and greenhouses. We still have some vegetable plants left including plenty of heirloom, hybrid, plum, and cherry-size tomatoes and also some very healthy patio tomatoes that have green fruits already on them.

Please come get your greens this week. The spinach is ready and delicious now, but may not last long (may bolt) in the heat later in the week. We have cilantro this year, too, which is also apt to bolt in the heat, but is great now–so get some for salads, burritos, to top off your Indian and Thai inspired dishes… The first crop of lettuces are headed up and ready–several varieties including red and green leaf, romaine, salad bowl, royal oak, Boston. Broccoli will be ready for harvest this week, as well, so either come pick your own soon, or you can find it in the stand later on in the week.

Ready in the stand and good for picking from now through the summer are 3 varieties of kale, collard greens, green and rainbow chard, and many fresh herbs including parsley, dill, thyme, and more. “

LexFarm members Beo and SweeCheng Lim plant trees

We had an exhilarating morning at the Lexington Tree Farm today..planting about 70 trees along with members of the Lexington Tree Committee, Field and Garden Club and Conservation Stewards. Those who have been doing this for several years now said this was the best turnout ever. Good thing, because without the 20 or so people, we wouldn’t have finished when we did – around 10:45, right when it started pouring rain.

Professor Brian Donahue

The featured speaker will be Professor Brian Donahue, of Brandeis University, with a talk entitled, “The Future of Farming and Forests in New England”. His book, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town, tells the story of the early years of Land’s Sake farm in Weston, placing it in the context of the general history of farming and forestry in the area. The book was a great inspiration to to many of us when LexFarm was first forming.

Here is the text from the CLC announcement with more details:
The Citizens for Lexington Conservation (CLC) is pleased to invite the public to its Annual Meeting on Tuesday, April 12 at 7PM in Cary Memorial Hall . The speaker at this year’s meeting will be Brian Donahue, Associate Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, with a talk titled, “The Future of Farming and Forests in New England”.

Professor Donahue is a Weston resident and is the author of “Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town”(1999). He also wrote “The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord which won the 2004 Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, the 2005 Saloutos Prize from the Agricultural History Society and the 2004 Best Book Prize from the New England Historical Association. Donahue teaches courses on environmental issues, environmental history and sustainable farming and forestry. He holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the Brandeis program in the History of American Civilization. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a nonprofit community farm in Weston, Mass., and was director of education at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

According to Prof. Donahue, Massachusetts has been losing forests to development since the 1970s at a faster rate than it gains unused agricultural land. Donahue suggests that between one-quarter and one-half of the land in every township ought to be ‘commons,’ either publicly held or privately-owned but subject to conservation easements.

Although he is certainly in favor of private farms as a part of every local economy, he further suggests that every town should have one community farm occupying and managing a portion of its public land, its activities demonstrating the essential connections between ecology, economics, education, and aesthetics, the four guiding principles of Land’s Sake. Supporting and emerging from the commons will be “a new common agrarianism within suburbanizing places,” the conviction that it is not only in wilderness-as Thoreau declared-but in the interaction between wilderness and civilization that lies the preservation of the world.

This presentation will be of great interest to everyone in Lexington. Members and non-members are all invited to attend this fascinating talk, which will be cosponsored by the Lexington Conservation Stewards. There will be a brief business meeting at the start of the evening and an opportunity to learn more about CLC. . Admission is free.

For more information, go to http://www.lexingtonma.org/clc/HomePage.htm

Patricia Gray

…our first Annual Meeting:
March 27 at 2:30 pm
Cary Memorial Library, Lexington

Please join us as we…
Look Back: We’ll take a quick look back at all we’ve accomplished together (including a video…)
Look Ahead: We’ll share our plans for the coming year, and get your ideas too!
Grow: We’ll let you know how to get involved, become a member and help us grow (both vegetables and our organization!) and
Learn: Our special guest speaker will be Patricia Donahue Gray, founding staffer and former Executive Director with the Food Project, who will share her thoughts and experiences in a talk entitled “Community Farms: Reflections of their Towns”.

I don’t, of course, intend the title of this post to be taken literally. I’m simply hoping that Lexington could someday enjoy and learn from it’s own community farm. I encourage you to visit Waltham Fields on a busy day sometime this season–it’s no more than a 10 minute drive from just about anywhere in Lexington–to get a sense of what a thriving, fun environment it can be.