Summer Break

To all our loyal readers: we are taking a break from posting for the summer. We’ll be back when the school year starts again, so look for us then– in the mean time, enjoy your summers!

Food Justice

By Lee West

In honor of May Day, a word about workers. Specifically, farm laborers. This past Tuesday, one of the nation’s largest food service companies announced that it will boycott Florida tomatoes if growers fail to increase pay and improve conditions for workers. Bon Appetit, the food service company, wants workers to be paid one penny more per pound of tomatoes harvested.

 This isn’t the first time Florida tomato growers have suffered from accusations of unfair labor practices. From 2001-2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker’s rights group in Florida, organized a boycott of Taco Bell as a way to put pressure on growers to improve conditions; that boycott ended when Taco Bell agreed to pay

4 Beers To Welcome Spring With

By Adam Franklin-Lyons

It would appear that this will be my final entry on the Yale Sustainable Blog (can a blog really be sustainable?  Good question) as a Yale student.  Graduation looms in May, which brings to mind parties, which should usually involve beers.  Many European traditions have some spring like beer, and while not all look forward to the hot days of summer – some of them remain darker and complex – and they present some of the more classic beer styles.  So here’s a list of great spring inspired beers to go out with a bang. 

farm Update Sunday April 27

By Nat Wilson

So hot today! Both walls of the greenhouse were wide open during today’s workday, to try to get a bit of a breeze through. It was a rough day to be wearing heavy pants, but even so, there was pleasure to be had, standing barefoot in freshly turned soil (off the beds of course). Laura, Joe, and Sarah did beautiful work prepping beds in our two eastern quads, while Liz, Nisa, and Meg measured out beds in the lower terrace to the north. Later, Joe helped keep the walkways under control by running the lawn mower,

Farm Update Sunday April 19

By Adam Walker It may have happened a week ago, but it’s still worth mentioning. 

By Adam Walker

We’ve got a red-tailed hawk that hangs around the farm, and it is one serious predator.  Last Sunday I glanced over toward the compost just as the hawk dropped onto the bottom terrace to nab a full-grown squirrel, which it proceeded to dine on in a tree above the container.  Quite a sight.  It seems we have the hawk to thank for keeping our garden clear of rats and other seed stealers.

Today we focused on preparing beds to be shaped for planting.  Andy, Karen, Dan, Ben and I measured out 30″ beds and 12″ rows for many of the areas we had tilled on Friday, and this week we’ll head in with shovels to clear out the paths.  We like to be so precise in our measurements before we start planting because it helps us to make sure each bed has ample room for all of the transplants we need to put in, and it keeps us from letting the weeds encroach on our planting space as the years go by.

 Wednesday’s workday will be happening rain or shine, and Friday should be a great day.  We’ll be celebrating the end of the school year and thanking all those who’ve helped us, by serving up a whole roast pig and other fixin’s at the workday’s end.  Hope to see you all there!

Farm Update Friday April 17

By Nat Wilson

As of Friday, all of the unplanted quads and terraces at the Yale Farm have been tilled. Tilling is a process in which the soil is ripped and shaken up, which make it much easier to prepare and plant. From a sustainability perspective, tilling has a pretty checkered record. Although the procedure makes the upper six inches of soil light and airy, works in the layers of mulching, and more or less obliterates any winter cover of chickweed, it can also over oxidise the soil, destroy important fungal communities, confuse the hell out of insects and soil microfauna, and contribute to creating a impermeable layer in the soil below the tilling level, which inhibits proper drainage. There are, in fact, various “no till” farming operations in existance, which aim to

Horseradish: What a Jerk

By David Thier

According to German folklore, horseradish can be planted at the corners of potato beds to deter potato bugs. It looks nice that way– the big, broad leaves contrast slightly with the masses of potato leaves, and the whole thing gives the impression that there is a grand feast just waiting below the earth. That’s a lie. Like many time-honored traditions, this is dangerous lunacy.

 Horseradish seems easy to grow: it’s resilient, requires very little maintenance and seems like it would be simple to grow enough to last a lifetime. “I could make my own horseradish!” one finds oneself saying about halfway through a summer, when the leaves have grown about two feet tall and started to develop a slight hint of the pungent aroma that one remembers from the white stuff on top of gefilte fish as a child, if one was Jewish as a child or one happened upon gefilte fish as a child, thought it seemed bland, and had a bottle of horseradish handy. The truth of the matter is that yes, horseradish is easy to grow. That doesn’t mean you should do it.

 The very properties that make horseradish such a breeze one year are what make it murder the next. They are nearly impossible to kill, and they grow long, spider-like roots up to a few feet away from where they were planted, even the smallest part of which has the potential to grow into a hardy plant the following year.

 At this point the stupider reader may think: “Great! Way more horseradish!” Way more horseradish indeed.

Farm Update Sunday April 12

By Adam Walker

 A beautiful Easter up at the farm today, including the first blossoming of some tulips in the greenhouse.  The crocuses are in bloom as well, and it won’t be long before the beds of tulips we planted in November start opening up.  Ida began the workday with some weeding through the streetside beds and caring for the lettuce starts that we seeded last week.  Rachel and I finished up this work and then started in on the Greenhouse.

 With all this nice weather, the plants are growing quickly, but so are the weeds.  To prepare for a planting of radishes, we pulled the weeds from two empty beds before adding compostand shaping the soil.  Michael came by to help us plant the seeds, and then assisted with the bittersweet task of

Farm Update Friday April 10

By Nat Wilson

There were two songbirds stuck in the propagation house when I got to the farm on Friday afternoon. I opened the doors, and they quickly found their way out.

We had a pretty good day, overall. It threatened to rain a couple of times, but during the workday never really followed through. We prepared twelve new beds, and worked on pulling the winter’s cover of chickweed. Mike and Chelsea turned compost, while Eunice cut down dead stalks on the berms between the terraces, and Vivianne worked, carefully weeding the aparagus terrace. In general, the day felt a lot like

Simple is Getting to Be Better

By Lee West

Most processed foods like to tell you what they don’t have:  “low fat,” “low carbs,” or (the worst) “low calorie.” Few foods, however, tell you what they do have. Here’s an idea: instead of selling foods that are not bad for you, what if people sold foods that were good for you?

 News is, we’re getting closer. Apparently someone told Madison Avenue that Americans are starting to care more about what they’re putting into their bodies. The response hasn’t been to change the product, but how it’s presented: according to a recent article in the Washington Post, food marketers are starting to advertise food for having recognizable, and relatively few, ingredients. “White corn, vegetable oil and salt,” says an ad for Tostitos. “Three ingredients is good.”

 My question is, good for who? The general message of these ads (and there are others, for potato chips and Fritos, ice cream and Snapple) seems to be that simple ingredients equals healthy ingredients. That’s not always true – think about sugar, or something like animal fat.

 That’s what rubs me about these ads: they take a complex problem – what’s the healthiest way to eat? – and oversimplify it with a simple equation of their product