On Friday, October 28th, students kicked off Halloweekend with a workday and knead 2 now. There was nothing spooky about the workday, though, as students braved the fall chill and got to work preparing the Farm for winter. The workday was heavily garlic themed— students clipped garlic heads and broke them into cloves. Students also sowed garlic beds, laying cloves on top of beds and tucking them into the soil.
Students threshed midnight turtle beans, which will be used to make a Three Sisters chili at our upcoming Fall Feast on Friday, November 11.
Students also spruced up the chicken coop with some plants and pulled basil plants for compost, which made the Old Acre smell like one giant margherita pizza.
And there was pizza, and plenty of it, as the Culinary Events Team churned out its usual stellar selection of pies.
With cider, tea, and pizza in hand, students gathered to hear Ismini Ethridge, a second-year Masters of Environmental Management student at Yale School of the Environment, Agroforester-in-Residence, and 2022 Global Food Fellow, give her knead 2 now. Ismini presented her summer research on Tree Gardens in the buffer zone of the Sinharaja Forest Reserve in Sri Lanka.
When Ethridge arrived in Sri Lanka, the country was in crisis. The previous year, the president passed a total ban on fertilizer and agrochemical imports, without consulting farmers about the decision. Ethridge visited Sri Lanka at a moment of national reckoning about the country’s economic and agricultural future. Ethridge visited the last remaining primary forest in Sri Lanka, and immersed herself in a village of 35 households, learning how tree gardens can be used for tea production, non-timber products, herbal medicine, and maintenance of biodiversity. Ethridge talked about a groundbreaking research paper published by Cindy Caron thirty years prior. Visiting Sri Lanka this summer, after the area had greatly improved its infrastructure and increased its emphasis on tea production, Ethridge could see how the landscape of agroforestry in the area had since changed. Ethridge was inspired by how increased tea production did not encroach upon the subsistence portion of the village’s agriculture; villagers were able to retain agency in the market. Ethridge was also impressed by the generational knowledge imparted to village children about the varieties and uses of plants. She also talked about her strategies for cultural immersion. She spoke about how she waited weeks to begin her research and spent the beginning of her time in Sri Lanka meeting the community.
After the k2k, students stuck around the Lazarus Pavillion as Raffa Sindoni MEM ’23 and math lecturer Erik Hiltunen of Spirit of the Glacier played some Swedish folk tunes on flute.
Thank you to everyone who attended and has been attending our workdays. It is the participants at these events who truly make them special. Photos from the event can be found here.