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

Does it have a roof yet?

No roof yet.

as you might have guessed, it's been very busy on the farm, between the vegetables, the guests, lively pot-lucks, and of course, building a house. I finally got the pictures from back when we worked on the foundation, so i thought I'd do a little educational illustration of how to build a foundation. If you really want to build one of your own, there are probably very good books with instructions, but this is what we did.

as nicholas mentioned previously, we dug a trench.

Hi, my name is Steph Plant and I’m new to the farm. (Alice asked me to write a blog entry, which I consider quite a treat, except I’m not quite sure what to say..)
I came to mustard seed community farm a week ago and I’m really glad I did.

Tomorrow night we'll have a potluck at the farm. Here's the info:

Catholic Worker Farm Philosophy
Next Friday, June 11th, with a potluck dinner at 6PM and a discussion at 7PM. Again, at the Mustard Seed Community Farm (366 W Ave, Ames, IA, 50014).
Alice will lead this discussion, focusing on the basic principles underlying Catholic Worker Farms in general, and our farm in particular.

We'll have other potlucks in the following Friday.

Nicholas

a stubborn robin built a nest in our tool-shed.

this is from Alice, posting an entry that nicholas wrote last week:

Hello, today I have an update on what's going on on the farm and some events you might want to attend at our farm.
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.