On Wednesday we did "The Green of Green." We added up our expenses for the peach and pesto project. We added up the expenses of the peach jam and pesto jars and our income. The other expenses were transportation, peaches, sugar, operation/building, pine nuts, basil, cheese, olive oil, and garlic. The total expenses were $184 and the total income was $296. It was 82 jars of peach jam for $3 each and 10 jars of pesto for $5 each. Some local people bought our product and Triskeles bought the rest for the golf outing gifts. Our profit was $112.
We also went over lessons learned over the program. Here are our notes:
Mulching - to keep the soil moist, cool, and loose. It also helps to keep the weeds down.
Harvesting beets - easier in moist soil; beets are roots plants; to harvest, you need to pull by them stem of the beet and then cut the stems
Harvesting potatoes - potatoes store well. They are tubers. The dark brown circles in potatoes are "plant eyes." To pick potatoes you need to dig the potatoes out, lift the soil, and then pick them by hand, or you can use a plow, but the soil was too moist to do that when we went to Charlestown farm. When you see a green potato, it's poisonous.
Weeding - weeds suck up nutrients, water, and sunlight, and they could be feed for animals. That is why we pick them. Weeds are good for making mulch and compost. A weed is a plant out of place!
Onions - to pick onions, you pull by the stem top, you chop the top 2 inches above the onion.
Carrots - a carrot is the root of the plant; you pull from the top, but pulling from the bottom of the stem is easier to get it out of the ground. Carrots have vitamin A and are good for your vision.
Insect control - chickens roam areas to help eat insects; you can also handpick the insects off plants (which we did); birds can help - purple martins can eat 2,000 bugs a day. BT is a bacterial disease that caterpillars get from sprayed pesticides. Some farms use tiny wasps to kill beetles.
Soil - to get soil, we can use horse manure, compost, cow and chicken manure. In China they use a green manure.
Sugars - high fructose is really bad for you! Sucrose is table sugar. Rice syrup, barley malt, and maple syrup are better for you than sucrose because they're not as processed.
Fresh/Local/Organic - Fresh: fresh food has vitamins, it has all of its nutrients, and it's not spoiled. Local: better environment that it's grown it, no transportation, more jobs in farms, undeveloped land (which means no factories or tall buildings - just farms). Organic: uses no pesticides, no chemicals, not genetically modified, no hormones or antibiotics.
Written by Megan
In the afternoon, we split up into three groups. One group made a type of herb salt - it had oregano and a lot of other herbs. We used mortar and pestles to grind it, then put the whole thing into a blender. Another group planted different kind of herbs to take home in pots with our names on them. Now we'll have our own organic herbs that aren't processed - we won't have to buy them. The third group made salsa for the dinner we're having Friday to end our great experience and for our parents to know exactly what we did.
Written by Eliana
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