I found out that this week is National Volunteering Week and US Veg Week. Who’d like to volunteer to come out and shovel the snow off our vegetable fields?
The other day I was looking for someone to deliver our drop site boxes to River Market in Stillwater. As I was trying to figure out who would be a potential deliver person I decided it would work best if I could somehow “see” where all our members live. “Hmm, why not use Google maps?” I thought. But entering in all that data seemed tedious. So of course I decided to use The Google to find a free way to get this to work and low and behold I found it. In fact there are a couple of services that do this. The one I used, BatchGeo worked well but didn’t have all the features I wanted at the price I wanted, which of course is “Free”. But it is able to load in addresses and map them for me.
What I couldn’t figure out was how to create the map so I could display it without exposing the addresses. Why did I want this? Mainly because as I looked over the map I realized there were many situations where several members live very close to one another. In fact there were a few instances where they look to live across the street from each other. “Did these members realize their neighbor is also a member of the farm?” I wondered, “Would they be interested in knowing this?” “Would it be fun or intrusive to know such intimate details of your neighbor’s eating habits?” Putting myself in this situation I would find it interesting to know that I have neighbors who share my interest in eating locally grown produce and even more so knowing that they are a member of the same farm as I am. I think that would be fun. Buy maybe that is just me and that our members are more private than I am. So I don’t want to expose everyone’s address to everyone else. That seems creepy to me. But I would certainly be willing to share contact information between families if both families agree to find out. Maybe they know each other. Maybe they are typical Minnesotans and don’t want to be intrusive or get to know their neighbors. But I still thought it would be interesting to show people that they are not alone. So I did a screen capture of a Google map. It doesn’t allow good zooming but you can at least see you are not alone. If by looking at this map you feel you want to get to know your neighbors feel free to contact me and I can check with the other person to see if he/she has a similar interest. Maybe the two of you can carpool, or swap pick-ups, or make life less chaotic by sharing the load. Just a thought.
What else is going on at the farm? We are still planting in the greenhouse. It is now overfull and we are putting flats in the aisles. This should work fine as long as we are able to get some of the plants out of the greenhouse before these aisle-flats sprout and require more sunlight.
I installed the bees into their new hives this past Sunday. Not the best bee installation experience. Lots of rain. A few angry bees. And an installer who wasn’t patient enough to remember to do everything right. The result? The bees are in their new home except for the two that stung us. This is the first time I ever got stung installing bees.
We are hopefully going to plant in the hoop house this Friday. We were planning to get in there earlier but it has been quite cold at night and I didn’t see any benefit in risking all our hoop house tomatoes and melons. The forecast mentions a warm-up by the end of this week. Will we finally move into spring?
Speaking of spring and volunteering: once the snow melts, the ground warms up and dries out we will need a lot of help getting 3-4 weeks of transplants into the ground. If you have any interest in coming out and putting your hands in the dirt please contact me. We generally work Mondays through Fridays when it isn’t raining (or snowing) and the ground is dry enough to plant. No need to commit now but if you get a hankering for a little mental health time off of work please come out and soak up the fresh air and sunshine! Contact me first to ensure we are working that day.
Speaking of volunteering, as we all know the potato planting and corn planting events have been postponed. I still don’t know when we will have these events.
Payments are due unless you made other arrangements. Please send in your payment at your earliest convenience.
Keep sending in films and links to films for our Fresh Earth Farms First Annual Fall Film Fest. We have four films so far. It could either be a short film fest or we’ll have to watch them over and over again.
We are still taking orders for all our shares: Veggie, Fruit, Meat, Cheese, Salmon, Egg, Flower (Mother’s Day is coming up!), Winter, Coffee. Prices are on our order form. To add any of these items just send me an email; no need to fill out an order form. We have one spot left for Shoreview. Other days/locations have room but could fill fast. If you plan to rejoin and haven’t yet please do so quickly. If you have friends/neighbors, etc. who mentioned an interest send them our way soon. It looks like we will sell out this year (though keep selling until we do).
Be sure to check out/use/etc. all our social media sites — or not. Here is the list:
www.FreshEarthFarms.com www.facebook.com/FreshEarthFarms www.twitter.com/FreshEarthFarms www.YouTube.com/FreshEarthFarms www.Pinterest.com/FreshEarthFarms FreshEarthFarms.tumblr.com
As always do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, jokes, brain teasers, etc.