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

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

We're having a cool spring this year and have delayed a lot of our planting to wait for the soil to warm up. So far, we've only planted a few trees, but in the next 12 days we're hoping to get a lot planted. If the weather cooperates and we have enough helpers, we'll be planting potatoes, onions, kale, peas, spinach, lettuce, rhubarb, and about 40 trees and shrubs!
We really need some help getting this work done. The next few days will be cold, rainy, and even snowy, and so we will need to wait for things to dry out a bit again, but then we can really get cracking.