Milton, FL: CWG Week 2

L2R: Preston, Pete, Claire, Leigh, Nick, Curt, Ryan.  Sunset over the peanut field.

Here we are at the end of our second week at Coldwater Gardens.  We've been eating great, working hard, and learning A LOT!

This past week, two new WWOOF'ers arrived from Portland, Oregon. Pete and Claire arrived in their sketchy black van...haha well that's exactly the way to describe it so you can visually picture what we're talking about. Aside from the sketchy van, these two are not sketchy at all. We are excited to have them around teaching us various things from Claire's knowledge of cooking gluten free to Pete's knowledge in soil building and gardening.

On monday, Pete wasted no time in instructing and motivating us all to start brewing some compost tea.  It was really exciting to learn a new way of enriching the soil and plants in a way we had never seen before. He compiled the materials:

• 5 gallon bucket
• 4 cups worm castings (the nutrient rich soil worms make from breaking down food scraps and garden compost)
• mesh screen to make a "tea bag" to hold the worm castings
• molasses
• Aerator and heater (bought from a pet store in the fish tank section)
• nylon panty hose (for straining the mixture into the garden sprayer)
• backpack sprayer

He put the worm castings in the "tea bag" and attached it to a string and had it dangle on the inside of the bucket. Then, he filled the bucket with water and added a couple Tablespoons of Molasses to activate the bacteria. After, he weighed the aerators down with rocks and inserted the heater (set to 80 degrees) and turned them on. After 24-72 hours, the "Tea" is strained through the nylon panty hose into the backpack sprayer. When sprayed on the soil or onto the plant itself, the compost tea acts as a natural fertilizer and disease control agent. PRETTY COOL STUFF!

Pete and the Compost Tea

On Tuesday and Wednesday,  we helped the lumberjacks Preston and Ryan organize and clear the area they had been thinning out. This included putting oak logs suitable for mushroom inoculation in the inoculation pile, firewood into the firewood pile, brush into burning and wood chip piles and so on. We definitely built up some arm muscles and had nice bonfire materials for the rest of the week!

Curt and Ryan and Preston and Leigh

Throughout the week, Curt got inspired to tackle and master the large food dehydrator in the smaller greenhouse. He was a CHIP MAKING MACHINE this past week. He processed WELL over 100 Kale, Chard, Mustard, Collard, Cabbage, and Broccoli leaves and made different seasoning mixes for all of them. So far, the Siracha/soy sauce seasoning was the biggest hit. Everyone was happy to shovel these nutritious chips into their mouths during breaks and the best part was how many green things stuck in people's teeth! Green things stuck in teeth are just plain FUNNY.

Dehydrator

Thursday we were able to ride along with Nick into Pensacola to deliver the weekly harvest to Global Grill. It's a very upscale $20-$30 a plate restaurant. We met Frank the Chef who was really adamant we stay around to collect the scraps from the fish he was in the middle of processing so we could add them to our compost pile (VERY HIGH in Nitrogen which is always needed in compost and soil). We even took a trip back into Pensacola with the van on Saturday (NOTE: it takes over an hour to drive into Pensacola from CWG) to experience the farmers market and CO-OP and get some groceries. We were able to fit 4 extra people in the van with 3 drums and a deck of cards- THINGS GOT FUN in the ZINGER...a mini drum circle and a few games of slap-it and go fish!

Leigh, Ryan, Preston, Nick and a good game of SLAP IT going on!

And finally, Friday we spent the morning adding to the Windrow Compost Pile (click on the link to learn more about small scale Windrow Composting) which is a long narrow compost pile with intentional layering and aeration tubes which give the pile the ability to break down compost into nutrient rich soils without turning. After that, we BUILT THE COB EARTH OVEN (in our most fanciest attire)!!! We'll update you on the specifics of the Cob Oven in a few days (We're still building)!  We ended the day with an awesome potluck that everyone participated in and included dishes such as nettle pesto, homemade hummus, cream cheese stuffed poblano peppers, grilled chicken and sausage, yummy kale, chili, and chocolate covered strawberries, with lots of ingredients fresh from the garden.  We're looking forward to next week's adventures where we'll get to meet project managers Mike and Natalia.  LOTS of new pics on Facebook!  And our movie recommendation of the week is Farmageddon (find it on Netflix) it's a real eye opener.