Farm and Schools Blog

Hello everyone!

I am happy to announce everything that we could harvest is out of the Farm and in the hands of either the district kitchens or Second Harvest.  Our final plowing is being planned for sometime in the first ten days of November.  Thanks to Jon Larson's classes from EVMS and Chad Mathison's class from A New Journey Middle School for all their hard work in getting the farm harvested.  Those kids have been out at the Farm about twice a week harvesting.  EVHS Construction class gave a hand in carrying all the irrigation pipe out of the field and stacked it beautifully.  What a great and willing work force we have in this district!

To date we have harvested one thousand twenty seven pounds of produce.  This year was an even more difficult year to be a farmer than last year. The late spring and sudden warmth was good and bad.  The wet spring was great for the wheat, not so much for the corn seeds that rotted and another section of something that didn't show that had to be tilled under.  Then the sudden HOT weather put the wheat in shock, but one watering helped it recover.  The final poundage for the wheat harvest was about 800 pounds.  Archer Daniels Milling (ADM) Cheney cleaned our wheat for us.  They don't usually just clean wheat at that mill and so had a really hard time getting the dockage numbers down.  Dockage is the weed seed and bugs and other junk that gets harvested along with the wheat.  Because ADM couldn't get our wheat clean enough for our use, they took our wheat and added it to their wheat to run through the complete milling process and then gave us 800 pounds of their wheat.  So all is well!

On Thursday, Oct. 27th from 6:30 to 8pm at he High School's harvest carnival, we will be displaying wheat treshing and trying to thresh, grind and make the flour into a pancake all in under 6 minutes.  Young women from Harmoney High and A New Journey Middle School have been invited to help us out.

Have you seen the new shed?  It looks great thanks to the efforts of last year's wood shop classes and this year's construction class.  Two more sheds are being built behind the current shed.  Our construction students will have had some great practice by the time they finish the sheds!

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me: momromeny@earthlink.net.

See you soon!

Lynette