Farm+Service

On MLK day, the Urban Agriculture Project was hosting a volunteer service at Good Hope Farm. It was a small area with a small vegetable patch in the front and 2 large vegetable patches to the side. There were a few huge mounds of wood chips, and a truck was coming in to dump some mulch. The people in charge told us how the farm was made recently (few months and a year), and that we would be prepping the area. A volunteer organization was there also to help out, as well as a representative from the news, and various people from Enloe who were all doing it for APES. They provided gloves, pitchforks, shovels, pickaxes, and rakes for us to spread mulch, compost, wood chips and dig holes. I went along with the gardening group, which consisted of us using shovels and pickaxes (the grass and clay was so hard we resorted to 'bunny hopping' on shovels and teeter tottered around on it until the clay broke loose) to create holes. We planted some native plants (two kinds of bushes) for water filtration and prevention of erosion of the water ditch next to the lake (across the farm). Interestingly, some of the plants' dirt was so frozen, the dirt refused to come loose and some of the compost that was added around the plants were frozen into solid chunks. The clay chunks combined with the grass were even larger frozen solid chunks. This is related to environmental science by understanding and using methods in environmental science to grow plants (adding in mulch and compost to add back in nutrients) and prevent erosion (by using plants, and native ones too).