11/15

Since our last blog post, Farmageddon has made a great amount of progress and we are finally in the end-stages of this project. Following the introduction of cauliflower and lettuce into our plots, all of our crops are established and we can shift our focus to harvesting.

In the final week of October, we were graced with big harvests of summer squash from our row of Three Sisters! This was super exciting as it was our first real harvest consisting of 15 squashes and 1 cucumber. Many of our classmates experienced issues with pests like melon worms eating their crops, but we luckily escaped with only two squash impacted.
We began the new month of November with a lot of slow developments in the garden. After our very bountiful squash harvests, we realized we had to do some editing to our Three Sisters system. All of our corn bolted early while they were still short, not giving the beans an adequate trellis to climb on. In the month’s first week we built extra trellising for our beans with bamboo stakes; additionally, we also began to heavily trim any damaged squash leaves and remove most of our corn.

       

While we put a lot of work toward our Three Sister system, we also welcomed a lot of new friends to the garden. Not only did a sweet baby angel and Otis, our frog, join us on our journey, but so did many butterflies, bees, and ladybugs that were attracted by our newly blooming marigolds and sweet alyssum. We finished this rainy week off with a small harvest of 1 squash, 1 cucumber, and a handful of yardlong beans. 

           

Two weeks into November, our hard work really paid off with multiple large harvests of all kinds of crops. While our summer squash have been delivering their last few waves of fruit, our two varieties of cucumbers were just getting started with their production. Though our corn didn’t quite work out, the yard long beans came at us strong with harvests of 100 or more. Our Sun Gold cherry tomatoes produced their first harvest as well, a sweet surprise with many more on the way.

       

Not only has our Incubator Project become a stable source of food, it has also become a beautiful and therapeutic garden. With rows of marigolds and sweet alyssum growing proudly alongside our garden decorations, we have many beneficials that help our flourishing crops and give our plot life. But it wasn’t easy, as we’re still accomplishing a variety of smaller tasks like weeding, supporting crops with stakes, and of course harvesting & cooking our produce to put them to good use. Reagan made a beautiful Farmageddon wooden sign inspired by our AI member, Willow, and also took some lovely photos of our farm. With both our strawberries and cherry tomatoes beginning to ripen, carrots and beets practically jumping out of the ground, and cauliflower, lettuce, and bok choy getting settled, we have so much to look forward to. Until next time!

https://youtu.be/PXCqrZHFZPY

You can see us working hard in this one! We have added some bamboo poles to help the yard-long beans climb. Since our corn did not get as tall as we expected, we implemented this idea. You can also see our cucumbers doing amazing and at their peak. As well as our carrots and beets coming in!