Our Field Today
Our First Harvest!!
It was so exciting to pick our first vegetables from our Wayland field. We picked cabbage, eggplants, and basil, packed it into boxes, and then delivered it to Open Table in Maynard.
Open Table makes and delivers community meals and also has a fresh market food pantry. We are very pleased to have partnered with them and will be bringing all of our produce to them.
Planting Tomatoes
We planted 130 tomatoes of many different varieties. Our seedlings are all grown from seed by our volunteers.
Installing Our Electric Deer Fence
Of course this area is just filled with deer. SO, our first work day was to set up an electric fence.
We used a 3-dimensional method, where three electric tapes are strung on two different fence spaced 3 feet apart. The outermost fence is a short one with tape at 30 inches high, the inner fence has tape at 5 ft and about 8 inches. This fence works well because deer have poor depth perception and the multiple bands of tape at different heights and depths confuses them. Along with the electric shock, this keeps them out of the field.
We have about a 10 minute walk along a conservation trail and through another field. A good deal of our fence project was just transporting materials. Eighty metal fence posts are heavy!
We fenced off a 100 by 100 ft square pretty much in the middle of the large field. Our plan is to use this area to grow crops, moving it’s location year-year and will keep the rest of the field under cover crops.
Our New Field
Aurelia’s Garden’s new field is a beautiful 2 acre space in Wayland! It was previously farmed for the past 13 years and is currently covered with a nice cover crop of rye grass. It is surrounded by tall oak and maple forests. What a space! We are very thankful to the owner of the land who is so generously letting us farm it as a donation mini-farm. We are looking forward to breaking soon – once we get our electric deer fence up and running.
Aurelia’s Garden in Medway
