Fiber Fun!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Students 

visit Central Virginia Fiber Mill

Our 9th year Sheep Manager organized a visit to the Central Virginia Fiber Mill to deliver the fleeces from our sheep.  The fleece will become lovely roving and yarn.  We will have new yarn for sale soon!

THANK YOU to Mary Kearny for teaching us about the process from raw fleece to yarn, roving, and batting.

As a bonus, we got to meet some very curious alpaca.

Hoophouse before the windstorm February 2012

We were just ready to harvest early spinach, lettuce, and radishes when we had a big windstorm that destroyed the plastic on the hoophouse.

Students water the plants daily

Chard

Lettuce

Plant's eye view

Radishes! We ate some for dinner on an overnight recently - yum!

The good news is that within 1 week we had ordered new plastic, repaired the damage, and added new anti-billowing straps to keep the wind from damaging the new plastic. 1 week after that, we had 60 mile per hour winds and the hoophouse came through it just fine! We're replanting now.

The bad news is that all of that fresh produce we grew for the Food Pantry was frozen when the plastic was damaged.

Tamworth Piglets Arrive!

Eagerly welcoming the new piglets

Cute but with a very loud squeal

Three Tamworth weanlings have joined us at the Farm School this winter.

Turnip Time!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School students grew turnips from seed and are reaping the fruits of their labor this November.

Farm School students have the option to become managers of an area of the farm in their 9th grade year. The 9th grade Garden Manager and one of her current garden crew members came in from the garden with a basket full of freshly dug turnips this week asking "can we please cook them up for people for lunch?!?" We were happy to oblige.

They used a cookbook recently donated by a parent, "From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce" to learn about preparing and cooking turnips.

They then peeled, chopped, sauteed and baked the white and pink roots and shared them with all of the students and faculty members.  We compared the taste of those sauteed vs. baked and salted vs. unsalted.

The initiative and follow-through demonstrated by these 12 and 14 year old girls is characteristic of the Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School. Such amazing young people!

Spring produce donated to Plant a Row for the Hungry

Proud of their harvest, Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School students bring their produce to the Rappahannock Food Pantry and Plant-A-Row-for-the-Hungry

student grown broccoli, spinach, and kale

Mimi weighs in the broccoli

Thanks to Hal Hunter for getting this all started by donating the hoophouse!

Students harvest...

the broccoli they planted in March...

and bring it to the Food Pantry the same morning - couldn't be fresher!

First Hoophouse harvest!

Our first Hoophouse for the Hungry harvest is in!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School students have planted cool season plants, and have already harvested spinach and kale. The garden chore group has taken on seeding, transplanting, and daily watering.  

We took our first harvest to the Rappahannock Food Pantry and helped unload a bread delivery while we were there.

Thanks Mimi for your leadership at the Food Pantry!

Montessori Farm School on Rappahannock Farm Tour!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School students led tours of the farm and school, demonstrated how to spin and dye wool, served fantastic homemade food, and helped young children paint pumpkins during the 2010 Rappahannock Farm Tour.

Work Made Noble Through Integrity and Passion

Ninth grade students have the opportunity to apply to be managers of one area of the farm. Here is a manager report from Rory Grambo, Animals Manager, Fall 2008

In the animal chore group we take care of the pigs and the chickens. They all seem to be doing well, and we are saving a lot of money on feed by feeding the pigs the food scraps from school. We are studying both the pigs and chickens in Occupations projects, and have various plans for them. We hope to breed the pigs this fall. However, if that doesn't work out, each of the pigs easily weighs 300 pounds and they will provide meat for the community. We have 16 chickens, of which 6 are new hens. However, not all of our hens are laying eggs at this point; we are trying to figure out which ones are laying and which are not. We also got new nesting boxes for the chickens. They started to use them immediately and this makes it much easier for us to collect eggs. Overall, the animals are doing very well and we hope to add more to our menagerie in the future.