Hello Mustard Seed community!

This summer has seen many people enjoy a multitude of experiences at the farm and I am no exception. I know there are many of you who wish they could come to the farm but are unable so I thought I would share a short mulling about a potato digging experience I had in hopes you might get a glimpse into a experience at the farm and enjoy it as much as I did.

Kind wishes,
Chantal

Potato digging

Today we harvested our honey for the year. Above you can see about half of it. In total, we probably got a little less than 2 gallons of honey, a good portion of which will go to our CSA.
Here's what the honey comb looked like before we harvested it:

Here's some pictures from the field day we and the ISU Student Organic Farm (SOFa) had July 31st. The field day was sponsored by the Practical Farmers of Iowa who are pretty cool. More pictures below:

The brown box on the right. Omar just put this up on Monday, followed by about 9 inches of rain, which caused some problems with cement drying. So hopefully these pictures are still accurate. It's called the rocket, and it should hold a few hundred bats once the population reaches its height. This should help some endangered bat species and cut down on some of our pests. More photos below.

our creek is usually less than knee deep in August, and 15 ft wide

what with the flooding, the potable water difficulties, and the potential for more rain tonight and tomorrow, we will not be having a potluck tomorrow night.

hopefully we will be able to reschedule a discussion about conscientious eating in the future.
- nicholas

Below: update, events, including friday night potlucks into august, and farm concert and farm tour.

Update

Today we had a very interesting discussion about health, led by Colette. I certainly learned alot! Next Friday, there will be a potluck at 6 and discussion at 7, led by Mary, who will be talking about water and geology. Since my camera's still not working, here's a picture of me next to water which contains large amounts of calcium carbonate and thus both creates and destroys geological structures.

Hello again, here's another update about what's happening at the farm: farm news, vegetable offers, and information on our next few Friday night potlucks. No pictures, cause i still can't find the cord that connects my camera to a computer.

Update

Here's some stuff from the beginning of the house building. As you can see, they'd poured a gravel base on the house site, and then we had to dig foundation walls around the edge of that for the concrete to have a good footing. Here's some pictures.
First we dug some by hand.

Then we got a fun tool.

Then the tool ran into some obstacles, mainly the previous house, and we had to do some more hand digging.

I think Alice wanted me to do more blog posts about bees. So here's some bugs that have been hanging out on the tops of one of our hives. We're hoping they're not hive beetles, which would seriously mess up the hive. Maybe they're cockroaches, which apparently isn't that much of a problem. For scale, the notches in the wood are an inch wide.