Dinner: 6 PM
Talk: 7 PM to 8 PM

Location: 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA

We will have Steve Cassabaum discussing his system of livestock production and the story behind Trinity Farms near Nevada, IA. You can check out their website at http://www.trinityfarmsia.com/

Work from 1 PM to 5 PM

Location: 366 W Ave, Ames, IA (Mustard Seed Community Farm)

We've gotten our deer protection up, so will be planting lots of spring vegetables that the deer are partial to eating: kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, and a lot of onions. We also may be doing some set up of our farm for the season, setting up rainbarrels and other tasks.

Our spring is proceeding somewhat slowly, as it has been quite cold. Luckly not cold enough to completely kill the onions and leeks we've recently planted, but still pretty cold. Nevertheless, we've planted all our potatoes for the season, uncovered our strawberries, and will soon have all our cool-season crops in the ground. We're still doing a lot of work to develop our new land. Some of these projects: We'll be burning our prairie in the coming weeks and have also started at least a thousand prairie plants to transplant into perennial areas of our garden to provide pollinator and predator habitat. We've mapped out the topography of our hillier garden and have built big berms to slow and capture the water running off our farm, and will largely plant our annual beds to also capture more water before it leaves our farm (We're technically out of our drought now (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), but are still reasonably preoccupied with on-farm water storage). We're also doing other things I can't remember.

There's a potluck this friday, December 13th.
at 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA, 50010
at 6 PM. Following dinner, we'll have a presentation and discussion about Mustard Seed's previous year, and maybe talk a bit about our future.
Feel free to come and bring food!

post neutering.

The 2013 growing season is coming to an end. The days are getting shorter and colder. Amazingly, there hasn't been a frost yet, but the harvests are dwindling. We've stopped having our pot-lucks outside on the farm, RAchel and Craig are getting ready to move off the farm and to beautiful Dubuque. (it's been great to live with them this year - we'll all miss them!) Our experiment with a Sabbath for the soil is coming to a close, and we are planning for next year - with a CSA again, hopefully with 20 paying members and 12 working members. OUr summer kitchen natural building project has been tons of fun, the kitchen isn't done, but it's pretty awesome and we just had our first pizza party with our new oven.

winter potlucks will be once a month, in Ames proper. The first two (Oct 18 and Nov 15) are at 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA, 50010
The time will be 6 PM dinner, 7 PM discussion
oct 18, a discussion of what makes effective altruism, led by mark Grundevelt
and Nov 15, practical lessons in knitting, mending, and maybe darning, led by Nicholas Leete and Alice
generally these potlucks might be on the 3rd Friday of the month - but December is always confusing.
more info to come

Garlic planting will be Friday oct 18, and Saturday oct 19, 9-noon, lunch, 1-5 both days. Please bring food to share if you plan on being here for lunch. This is the last big hurrah of the season, and you will probably be able to take home some of the last vegetables of the season as a thank-you for your help in this effort. PLease call Alice if you are planning to come 515-460-1467

Finally, we are planning on having a CSA for 2014. WE hope you or a friend might be interested in joining. WE realize you might have changed your loyalties since we abandoned you this year. But please remember that we haven't abandoned our mission, and we expect to grow delicious food in abundance next year. The price might be $400 for a 20 week share. Again, give Alice a call if you are interested.

much love

Tomorrow (saturday), we have a workday, getting ready for Alice and Nate's wedding, from 8 AM to noon. We chose that time because it will be cooler in the morning. However, it will also not be very hot in the afternoon as well, and not too bad on Sunday either. So if you'd like to come make our farm functional and nice looking, feel free to come saturday or sunday!

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.