on the farm

I spent a few days at the Philadelphia Community Farm in Osceola, Wisconsin this week. My friend Loyal is a farmer there, and I plan to visit often throughout the summer. On this trip, we planted over a thousand onion starts, weeded the spinach, and did plenty of hiking around the creek foraging watercress. It was beautiful.

The Philly Farm uses Biodynamic farming practices. In Biodynamics, the farm is treated as a unified organism, and treating the soil with nourishing plant and animal materials from the farm, rather than chemical pesticides. There are many Biodynamic "preparations" for the soil and compost, and we gathered dandelions for one of them. The flowers will dry over the summer, and in the fall will be put inside a cow's mesentery and buried in the soil. In the spring, the preparation is dug up, and the dandelions are added to the compost. I look forward to learning more about Biodynamics this summer. Below are some of the dandelions, and a photo of the beautiful wallpaper in one of the farmhouses.