Summer is here, and I’m spending it outside on our farm, the (aptly named) Carleton Student Organic Farm! I’m one of this year’s three Farm Interns along with Dia Davis and Kelsea Dombrovski, which is a fancy way of saying that we are taking care of the farm over the summer. Our goal is to produce enough to sell to Bon Appétit, so that Carleton students will be eating super fresh, local produce in the dining halls come fall and the Farm will earn enough to sustain itself for another year!
We started by planning out what, where, and when to plant with Griffin Williams, one of last year’s interns, and David Hougen-Eitzman, a Carleton prof who serves as our supervisor. Towards the end of the term and the beginning of the summer, we began clearing plots of weeds, putting in drip irrigation, and planting. A lot of our earlier planting during spring term was seedlings kept in the greenhouse and lightroom in Hulings that we later transplanted: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cabbage, onions, basil. Later, during the first week of summer, we did some direct seeding of parsnips, carrots, beets, beans, chard, summer squash, and cucumbers – almost all of which have sprouted by now! We’re still waiting on the parsnips, but they often have a longer germination time. We also just started some cabbage and winter squash seedlings, to be transplanted probably sometime next week.
Most of the farm, including a separate plot planted earlier in the spring by Farm Club (look for the raised beds and bean trellis!), is right behind Farm and Parr Houses – there’s a wooden sign and archway from the Rec Center parking lot. We have a new plot there this year: coming up the woodchip path from the sign, the first tomato plot you reach was actually all prairie last year, so it will be interesting to see how the tomatoes end up faring there. We also have a 1-acre plot by the frisbee fields and baseball diamond where we’re planting the winter squash that was first planted last year, I think, and still has quite a lot of thistle.
Right now, having planted everything except the winter squash and cabbage, we are weeding and waiting, as well as cleaning up around the shed and finishing up irrigation. More to come later, as our plants keep growing!