Farm Meeting Notes March 31st

This is the farm meeting on March 31.
Present; Ashley M, Ashley L, Courtney, Sascha, Ben, Bobby, Erika, and Alicia

Agenda:

Goat fence
Greenhouse
Potting soil
Re-seeding
Goat Milk and milking
Manure
Tractor work
Work party schedules for april
CSA members payment stuff
TSL
Student Group
Barn Party (and cleaning for)
Scheduling and work shifts
Fencing

Goat Fence;
Ladies fence, that is. We need to make a new one. We should schedule a day to do it with the tractor.
Do we want to enlarge their fence?
Inner perimeter stock fencing and electrified grazing area, which will be enlarges. But the stock fenced area doesn’t need to get bigger, and could even get smaller. Put electric fence in areas that are already clear and maintain the electric fence line – mow, weed whack. We have to baby proof the inside perimeter fence. Maybe flip the stock fencing upside down
So we’ll create work days based around that. There shall be a little meeting the night before the work day to work out the details.
Some say that at least six people should work on it together.
Erika says we should put a fence line from the corner of the banty shed so that they have a fence, to keep away large predators.

Greenhouse;
There are holes in the plastic, because it got stapled above the wood brace.
Until it ripped it was working great!
Things are staying warm.
Whoever wakes up first in the morning, go turn the space heater off.
The potting soil mix we made sucks. Too much sand, no water, plants aren’t growing. We’ll buy potting soil at Macenroe’s tomorrow. We’re talking about buying some compost now. Turning the idea over. Sounds like maybe we ought to do that. So we’ll get one cubic yard of potting soil and one cubic yard of compost.
We will still continue the search for horse manure.

Reseeding;
Ashley M.’s proposal is that we dump everything we have and re-seed.
Okay, we say.
That will be a major priority this week.

Hoop house; ---

Goat Milk and Milking;
Now we’re milking once a day. We could potentially start milking at night.
What are we going to do with the milk?
More people need to get trained in milking.
If you are the last person to use the milking stuff, wash the milking utensils right away.
Ben can milk. Lots of people would like to learn. We’re also going to have another milking goat soon. Maybe there could be a couple people to a goat. Or, say, Ashley and Erika could be ‘primary milkers’ and others could fill in a couple times a week as needed.
Okay, no night milkings yet.
Court wants to make cheese a couple o tmies a week, and we’ll make yoghurt often and we like fresh milk, and we don’t have that much milk anyway right now, so that’s easy.

Tractor work;
Now we’re talking about what trees to keep or cut. The big ones by the road cast lots of shade and are very unhealthy. The two little ones ought to come out based on cutback in space that we will have tilled.
We’ll take a field walk tomorrow after lunch.


CSA Members payment stuff;
Ash has some edits to make of the pamphlet and then she feels we are ready to widely distribute that info.
As for city folk, they will get back to us by mid-week next week after they’ve met. Bobby will be at that meeting.
Ashley’s talking about scaling back.
So maybe just ten shares – five shares for tortuga and five sold locally. Linda at TSL wants to have a meeting. (She’s down with our proposal.)
Ash proposes that locally we do 10 shares. Plus 5 for Turtuga.

Fencing;
Who’s working on researching deer fencing?
Bobby will do it.
8 foot.