Greetings! I, Matt Eiland, am back for another year at the Moose Hill Community Farm as an apprentice, and I am very excited to be working alongside our new apprentice Ryan Brown. With a little less than a month away from our first distribution day, there is a lot of heavy duty work taking place in our fields as we speak! Wards Berry farm has already begun to seed, till, spread mulch and compost, and much more as we prepare for another season of getting our hands nice and dirty.
deer or fox tracks – what do you think?
There are strawberry plants under all that thick straw!
Wards Berry farmers hard at work in our fields, spreading black plastic mulch in preparation for planting.
This year, we are planning to organize a few more activities with our shareholders including two potlucks – one in late June and one at the end of the season, and you will want to be on the lookout for a canning and/or cooking class in early August.
As many of our returning shareholders know, every season is a new growing season. We work hard with our farmer, Jim Ward, to plan a variety of crops and to adjust the amount of vegetables planted to fit the needs of our shareholders; it is a fun puzzle to work on from year to year. Once we are certain we are providing the vegetables for our shareholders and for the food pantries that we commit to each year, we look at other ways to share the over-abundance. Last year we started the “Buy a bucket” program, which was received by many people as just great. For us, it 
was a wonderful way to allow shareholders to get even more of a crop that we had in over-abundance as well as to invite non-shareholders into the fields to learn about who we are, get some fresh organic vegetables, and hopefully gain new shareholders for the future. We suspect that you will see this program again this year – details will follow in weekly postings and at the distribution barn during the season.
The work hours calendar will be emailed to all shareholders within the next week. Look for your email and sign up for your work hours before your favorite date and time slots are taken! You will notice that there will be more slots available to sign up after the first week of July, at which point more help is needed as the harvest amount increases. We look forward to working with you in the fields!
Lastly, remind your vegetable-loving friends to read about our farm, learn more about what it means to be a shareholder, and about our philosophy of farming, and be sure to encourage them to register for a share before we sell out.
See you at the farm soon enough!