CIDER PRESSING -

Saturday Oct. 4th from 1-5. Bring as many apples as you want or can and we'll have a big pressing with our big old fashioned hand turned press and make cider you can bring home.

More details in coming weeks, but start locating some apple sources (lots of people have trees they would be happy to share if you pick em). THIS WON"T HAPPEN UNLESS YOU BRING YOUR OWN APPLES!!!!!!! We only have a few at the farm, and having to outsource our own.

Thanks, sure hope to see you, its been beautiful at the farm!

Invitation for a permaculture design class at the Mustard Seed Community Farm, taught by Adam Campbell from the Peace and Permaculture University in northeast Missouri.

Permaculture is the practice of designing farming and living space to be in harmony with and benefit from the natural environment, of examining and using multiple functions of our plants, lands, and ecosystems, and caring for the earth and people in a rejuvenating human system.

The schedule for the class:
Saturday, July 26th, 9 to 5 PM
Sunday, July 27th: 11 to 4 PM

The class will be held at Mustard Seed Community Farm: 366 W Ave, Ames, Iowa, 50014. Mustard Seed is 10 miles north and 6 miles west of the town of Ames.

Also, there will be optional activities are available Saturday night and Sunday morning if you're camping or want to stay later or come earlier.

The class is offered following the gift economy: they are our gift
to the community and we hope that you will think they are so worthwhile
that you might give a gift to us as you are able - to help cover the costs
of the class, or to offer your time to the farm, or perhaps you will be
inspired by this class to go out and give a gift to the greater world.

Register for the class by contacting Alice McGary at (515) 460-1467 or mustardseedbee@gmail.com.
Camping is available on the farm.

Unfortunately, because of the coming thunderstorms, our seed saving workshop Sunday (today) will be cancelled. We will still be having the seed-saving workshop, on either August 16th or 17th, from 1 to 4 PM. We'll let you know further details soon.

Apologies!

Nicholas

June 28, 8 to 4 PM
Weed harvesting, green bean planting, and weeding

July 5, 1 to 5 PM
Garlic harvesting, processing, and eating, and probably some weeding.

July 19: 1 to 5 PM
Weeding, green potato digging, and raspberry eating.

August 9: 8 AM to noon
Weeding, cover crop planting, melon eating

Sep 20, 9 AM to noon
Sweet Potato Harvesting. We'll be harvesting most of our sweet potatoes. Workers can expect to take some freshly dug sweet potatoes home and learn a lot about digging!

October 4: 9 to 5

we'll be having a workday tomorrow, from 9 to 5. We've got lots of things to do, like tomato trellising and weeding and maybe some prairie things.

Our summer potlucks have started, where together we explore issues related to agriculture, the environment, social justice, and spirituality. This Friday's (June 13th) will be led members of transition Ames, Carolyn Raffensperger and Nathan Thrailkill.

The rest of the potlucks, also on Friday, are below:

August 15: Transition from fossil fuel and resilience to climate change
August 22: Examining race and privilege, led by Mark Becker and Jason
August 29: Reestablishing tradition: praire restoration basics, led by Nate Kemperman
September 5: Exploring the co-existence of GMO's and organic agriculture, led by Bekka Brown

Dinner: 6 PM
Talk: 7 PM to 8 PM

Location: 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA

We will have Steve Cassabaum discussing his system of livestock production and the story behind Trinity Farms near Nevada, IA. You can check out their website at http://www.trinityfarmsia.com/

Work from 1 PM to 5 PM

Location: 366 W Ave, Ames, IA (Mustard Seed Community Farm)

We've gotten our deer protection up, so will be planting lots of spring vegetables that the deer are partial to eating: kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, and a lot of onions. We also may be doing some set up of our farm for the season, setting up rainbarrels and other tasks.

Our spring is proceeding somewhat slowly, as it has been quite cold. Luckly not cold enough to completely kill the onions and leeks we've recently planted, but still pretty cold. Nevertheless, we've planted all our potatoes for the season, uncovered our strawberries, and will soon have all our cool-season crops in the ground. We're still doing a lot of work to develop our new land. Some of these projects: We'll be burning our prairie in the coming weeks and have also started at least a thousand prairie plants to transplant into perennial areas of our garden to provide pollinator and predator habitat. We've mapped out the topography of our hillier garden and have built big berms to slow and capture the water running off our farm, and will largely plant our annual beds to also capture more water before it leaves our farm (We're technically out of our drought now (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), but are still reasonably preoccupied with on-farm water storage). We're also doing other things I can't remember.

There's a potluck this friday, December 13th.
at 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA, 50010
at 6 PM. Following dinner, we'll have a presentation and discussion about Mustard Seed's previous year, and maybe talk a bit about our future.
Feel free to come and bring food!