Today we worked in groups on a project designing our own, self sufficient, agroecological farms. Our farm was the best! (Not that I've seen the other ones to compare but it just has to be.)
We designed a five acre farm that had an apple orchard intermixed with cover crops of bell beans and mustard as well as pasture for our chickens, and five rotating fields. In one field we would grow strawberries and alfalfa, followed by broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi, then a field of lettuce and spinach, then a fallow year when we would graze our draft animals and milk goats, followed by a cover crop.
Our housing complex included a house, a roadside stand (with hot chocolate as a must-sell item), a storage and processing facility with an industrial kitchen where we would make thing like jam and saurkraut and we could also cater for our small B&B on the cliff over looking the ocean based out of two yurts, and we also had a distillery to make even more value added products. Oh! And we had a band stand so that we could have bands come or we could host events at the farm including weddings. And the whole group would run the farm.
Sounds pretty idyllic doesn't it? And we had a wonderful consultant this session, Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry, who said that if we were doing most of the labor we would be able to make a profit. He also gave us our wonderful name - Turnip Truck Farms.
I'm indefinitely intrigued by the artichoke flowers! Who knew they looked like this?
Flowers in the PICA garden (we ate tons of edible flowers on our salads from this garden every night).
Hen house at Life Lab.
No comments:
Post a Comment