Mike Ribblett

Soil Conservation, Grapes, and Blackberries

Monday June 30th was an easy day on the farm. I went out to pick blackberries and we have almost reached our quota of 50lbs for Pherm Brewing. After that my internship advisor for the IAA, Becky Tetter, came out to visit the Urban Farm. Dave and I gave her a tour around our office and the Urban farm. In the afternoon I had my weekly connection meeting and guest lecture series with Steve Darcy from the PG County Soil Conservation district. This lecture really hit home for me because it exemplifies Dave’s and I’s mission here at the Urban Farm. We need to practice better farming techniques and that's what we do here. On the Urban Farm we use different methods such as IPM, Conservation/minimum till (really its strip tilling cover crops) Cover crops, and a mix of pesticides and occasional fertilizers. We take the information and the practices here and we give the information away to our local farmers who might be struggling with some methods and we tell them "here's our data and what worked for us in this environment, try it this way and see what happens”. Of course it's going to be hard to grow some crops here in Maryland because of the weather and disease/insect pressure but we try anyway so that we can tell our farmers here what the best practices are to successfully grow crops.

On Tuesday July 1st (I can't believe it's July already) I worked in the vineyard with Brian and Dave. It's been about 2 weeks since the vineyard got a hedge so that's what we worked on. We only saw some spots in the grapes that have downy mildew and we wanted to work on getting more airflow so that the grapes don't contract downy mildew. It can come in and ravage your grape crop if you're not on top of it. Everything got cut back so it looks beautiful now!

From left to right, this is a before and after picture of 2 rows of our vineyard. Notice how the vines are hanging into the middle of the row and dragging the weight of the grape plants down. This can be dangerous for them so we worked on trimming those back as well as anything that got too long.

On Wednesday July 2nd I stayed inside to catch up on all my office work. I was planning on being outside but the weather turned sour and it rained on and off for most of the morning. Fortunately, I was able to do all of my other work inside. It stopped raining in the afternoon and I was able to go outside for a bit while it was sunny, so I walked around the farm and checked on all of our plants. 2 weeks ago Dave planted sunflowers and I noticed that they started to poke out of the ground! We also are starting to see lots of blooms from our pumpkins, squash and cucumbers. I even picked our first batch of cherry tomatoes from the high tunnel!

From left to right. This is our soon to be sunflower patch! They are really coming out of the ground now and hopefully the ground hog doesnt get to them first. The first batch of cherry tomatoes are in! They are really delicous.

On Thursday July 3rd I did both farmwork and some office work. Outside, I worked on picking blackberries. Today, we reached our 50lbs quota for Pherm Brewing! That means that whatever we pick I’m still going to weigh but after that they will be given away to everyone in the office. I then worked in the high tunnel and looked for any weeds that may have popped up (very few were left over from last week) and to twine up the tomatoes. We are starting to get lots of peppers so I will probably end up picking them next week. I left the office early to get my holiday weekend started early! Happy Fourth of July!

Although the final batch of blackberries have been picked for Pherm Brewing we still have many many more to pick for our office!