Langwater Farm

I made it to Massachusetts!  It took me about nine days to get across the country and I’m so glad to be home! I brought  my friend, Mel, back with me as well. She’s here to help us get the greenhouse up, which we are currently working away on. Mel and I met about 6 years ago when we were both apprenticing at Indian Line Farm, a CSA and market farm in the Berkshires. For the past 5 years she’s been managing her own CSA outside Minneapolis at Gale Woods Farm.  Before we left on the final leg of the trip to Massachusetts, we took a tour of her farm.

Gale Woods Farm is part of a large park district in the region and is home to the district’s educational farm programs. The newly-expanded education center/barn houses all the farm animals–chickens, pigs, turkeys, cattle, sheep–as well as teaching space and a small farm store, where they sell farm-raised vegetables, eggs and meat. Thousands of school kids come through each year to learn about how farms produce food, as well as basic kitchen skills and wool crafts with wool from Gale Woods’ sheep.

Mel’s part of the farm–the vegetable growing operation–works with a group of 14- and 15-year old Youth Farmers from the Minneapolis metro area. The Youth Farmers spend 22 hours a week for 10 weeks over the summer learning how to grow vegetables and receiving leadership training.

While we were there Mel showed me her large chicken tractor, the Henabago. A chicken tractor is not a tractor per se, but a mobile chicken coop that allows the hens to be moved across pasture over the span of many weeks.

As they move through each patch of pasture they fertilize, eat bugs and lightly till the surface of the soil. The Henabago is out of commission for the winter, but usually houses about 50 chickens.

Nearby is the Gale Woods turkey pen, holding about 35 Bronze-Breasted and Eastern White turkeys. As we were watching them, we noticed a smaller bird on the far side of the pen, but outside of it. Looking more closely we realized that this was a wild turkey, not a farm-raised turkey.

Although stymied by the electric fence, this turkey wasn’t trying escape from the pen, but trying to get into it–not a wise move for a turkey a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

Back in Mel’s vegetable fields I admired her brilliantly-shaded Red Russian kale and enjoyed some of her amazingly sweet spinach.

Cold weather brings out sugars in greens like spinach as the plants try to protect themselves. Minnesota-grown spinach is an experience unto itself–I’ve never tasted spinach this deliciously sweet!

After a thorough discussion of cover cropping tactics for weed suppression, we went home to feast on kale and half a dozen winter root vegetables that Mel and her band of Youth Farmers had grown.

Mel eating spinach