Week 5, Spring 2025
What a week! It turns out that April showers bring…
Dandelion flowers
May scours (of the alfalfa field, looking for our baby trees)
May cows, strolling across the road
May glowers (at Eric when he tells us all the flats have to come in again tonight)
and, most importantly, May hours and hours with wonderful visitors!
This week, we hosted a group of students and staff from the Scattergood Friends School (a boarding school for grades 6-12 in West Branch, Iowa, grounded in Quaker values), who visited us as part of a school-wide spring service trip. The week was full of long outdoor meals under the lights, bonfire nights, and sweet intergenerational connection with both the students and teachers. And they got so! Much! Done! The Scattergood crew put in long hours mulching our baby trees in the silvopasture and weeding the overgrown high tunnel. By the end of the week, over 400 of the new trees were mulched (allowing us to declare temporary victory against the relentless alfalfa) and the high tunnel was ready for us to plant.
It’s pretty incredible to see how much a big group can accomplish — tasks that would have taken us days or weeks plugging away got done in just a few hours. It made me think about different systems of labor sharing that make small-scale farming viable. During my year farming in Puerto Rico, it was normal to organize big community brigades to help farmers get big tasks done, like clearing an overgrown section of a farm or building a greenhouse. A group of 10-20 people would spend the morning working, and then someone would cook a massive meal and we’d spend the afternoon eating and laughing and drinking Coors Light. In the same vein, the idea of “barn raising” comes from settler farming communities across North America in the 1700s and 1800s, in which a whole community would come together to build a barn for an individual farmer. Everyone was expected to participate — and everyone could expect the community to show up for them when it was their turn. I’m wondering how we can build that culture at ZA, and build it into our food and farm systems more broadly.
After work hours, the Scattergood crew crammed in more fun activities than we fit in a whole season — they visited baby emus, took a field trip to Fair Oaks Creamery, went to see a movie, and made a valiant effort to go bowling (as best as I can tell, the local bowling alley hours are: open whenever you happen to drive by, closed whenever you want to go). It was also fun for us to get a taste of what life looks like at Scattergood. Every night, the Scattergood crew did a Quaker practice called “Collection”, where they sat in silence — sometimes for as much as ten minutes! — until someone is moved to speak and share a reflection from the day. Many ZA folks joined in on various nights.
Baby emu visit!
On Wednesday, we all headed to Beaverville for a day of work at Fresher Together, a Black and LGBTQ+ owned and led food and farming project less than half an hour away from us. Chef Fresh and their partner Danie are focused on growing “flavor foods” like alliums and herbs, making fresh produce accessible to South Side communities via a BIPOC Harvest Bag program and regular community dinners, and opening their space to the community for restoration and healing. We reached out to Chef Fresh as part of our goal to deepen relationships with fellow local sustainable farmers, building networks of mutual aid and support as federal funding sources are cut.
At Fresher Together
We spent the day helping the Fresher Together crew take down and fix the electric fence that protects against groundhogs and other creatures, and weeding several long beds to get ready for spring planting. It felt wonderful to connect with local folks thinking about the same questions we are — what it would take to grow enough food for our people, how to respond to this political moment, and what a different kind of food system looks like.
After our day at Fresher Together, Margalit and I kept heading north to Chicago, where we joined a day-long May Day March for Immigrants and Workers. The night before the protest, Margalit went to a Chicago Food Policy Action Council meetup where she got to talk to other farmers about how they are responding to massive funding cuts and authoritarian takeover. It always feels good to remember how many of us are in this together.
At the May Day March with Sophie, Margalit, and Anya
Saturday brought the biggest event of the spring season, probably in Zumwalt Acres history, likely of the entire twenty-first century: a gathering of Eric’s extended family on the farm! Biggest highlights of the day: a “light potluck” (read: an overwhelming abundance of food), laughing with Eric’s mom about Phoebe and Nooch’s hijinks while they stayed with Eric’s family in Chicago one winter, a gaggle of adorable kids bouncing on our trampoline, and a treasure trove of embarrassing stories about Eric that I will be holding over his head until the end of time.
Eric with his brothers!
Sending May love to you all,
CEP