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.

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

we'll be talking about property

you and anyone else can come

A couple weeks ago, we planted our potatoes, along with some other things. Here's a picture.

So the goose, or some other goose, is nesting again in the hollow of a tree in our grassland. We'll see if it's successful this year (last year we think an owl or something killed the young).

Farm Update
The farm is warmer, and I think we had our last really cold night last night, and we should be able to start planting things like peas and radishes outside without worrying about a really killing frost. Also, in our grassland, we've started to see the first shoots of cool-season grass coming up, which, as soon as it gets a little bigger, we'll burn in order to weaken those grasses, to give more space for the prairie species that hopefully have survived from when we planted them last year. We've also started planting some more fruit trees, have started some seedlings of individual prairie plants and flowers for pollinators along with some vegetable seedlings, and are working on cover crop plans and orders.

Potlucks
We have two more potlucks this winter, and then we'll be moving to the farm for our potlucks. We'll probably have a tentative schedule for the summer.

April 5 Oscar Romero: at 2923 Woodland St, Unit 1, Ames, IA, 50014
We'll watch some film clips from a movie and have a discussion about Oscar Romero, a bishop and human rights activist in El Salvador: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93scar_Romero

May 3 Property: at 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA 50010
As we're buying a farm, it seemed a good time to have a discussion about the nature of property and things associated with it, like theft, resources, work, money, economies, and the government!

Workdays
We've got a lot of work to do to get ready for the spring, so if you want to come help us, that'd be great! Here's some of our upcoming workdays.

Saturday, April 6th, from 1 to 4 PM
We'll be pruning our raspberries, removing cages from our trees, and planting some cool-season vegetables, and starting some warm-season seeds.

Saturday, April 13th, all day
9am-noon, a break for lunch, the 1pm-4pm, followed by a farm meeting.
We'll be planting cool-season crops: potatoes, onions, brassicas, peas, spinach
and many trees! Please come - we really need some help this day!

Saturday, May 18th, 9-noon, lunch break, then 1 to 5 PM
We'll be planting out tomatoes and most of the rest of our warm-season vegetables