Saturday, July 20, 8 AM-12 PM
We'll be doing some work, probably involving cover crop planting

Saturday, July 27, 8 AM-12 PM
We'll be getting the farm ready for Alice and Nate's wedding and doing some weeding and other farm work.

Potlucks
We just about have all our potlucks scheduled for the summer. Every summer potluck is on the farm, with soccer at 5 PM, dinner at 6 PM, and a discussion from 7 to 8 PM. Feel free to come to all or any part of the potluck/soccer/discussion complex! Here's a schedule of the next few discussions:

July 5: Water: What does clean water mean?
July 12: Air: Drone warfare and morality
July 19: Love: Sharing our wildest dreams for our lives
July 26: Ethical meat eating
August 2: NO POTLUCK OR SOCCER OR DISCUSSION, they will continue the following Friday

Farm Update
Our farm continues to exist, there has been a reasonable amount of rain, and not much of anything is dying yet, although japanese beetles may denude our raspberries. Speaking of fruit, a lot of our fruit trees will be bearing fruit for the first time: we've just harvested our first big crop of cherries, and will hopefully be harvesting peaches and plums in the coming months, which is pretty exciting. We'll see if the squirrells have realized there's nut trees on our farm yet, if not, we should also have a good crop of hazelnuts. Other than that, we continue to grow food and are working on planting some prairie and other plants. Finally, our natural building class was a big success, I think a lot of people learned about building with soil and straw and other materials, and we've got the start of an outdoor kitchen set up.

Hi All! We start TOMORROW at 9am for the Natural Building Class! Feeling a little out of the loop and unprepared? No worries, you're still welcome to come and join us!

Where am I going?
Mustard Seed Community farm's address is at 366 W Ave, Ames, IA 50014. However, we're in Boone County. So check out this map (http://goo.gl/maps/2SCq6) to make sure you're headed to the right place, 10 miles north of Ames and 5 miles west. Sometimes GPS units steer people the wrong way.

What should I bring?

In this newsletter:

a farm update
Workdays
Potlucks

see more info in the post below

Here's a chicken coop we are building. So far, we've just got some adolescent chickens living in it, but they will likely make eggs at some point, and we'll try and use their digging activities to our advantage.

hi friends,

there's a lot in this email:
1. natural building class poster attached
2. list of many things we are looking for: natural building supplies, fencing needs, building repair supplies and skills
3. Work Day this saturday, 9-12, lunch, 1-5. please rsvp 515-460-1467. for at least one hour (3-4pm probably), we need a bunch of people here at the same time to help us move our greenhouse, to make space for the new kitchen we're building. please consider coming for this.

At our last potluck roundtable, we discussed property. I found this topic particularly interesting since my partner Craig and I are currently packing up all our belongings to move in to the RV on Mustard Seed for the summer.

This task turned out to be much more complicated than it sounds. First of all, we had to find a place to store much of our marginally useful stuff (or, slightly less guilt-inducing, the things we won't need on the farm simply because we can use what the farm already has, like dishes). We also labeled several boxes "Goodwill" and filled them with things we really could not justify owning. Then, we spent some time offering furniture to friends in hopes that they would help us transport not only that furniture, but also the pieces we want to keep in storage.

at 704 duff Ave, Ames, IA, 50010
at 6 pm

we'll be talking about property

you and anyone else can come