Phillip Hall '21

Land Management Assistant for Kingfisher Farm, Summer 2018

This summer I worked as the Land Management Assistant for Kingfisher farm. I spent two days a week working on the Harvest table farm, a five acre organic farm that supplies produce and eggs to the Harvest Table restaurant and the Meadowview farmer's market. This involved planting, maintaining, harvesting, and processing various foods. Daily tasks on the Harvest Table farm involved watering, planting, trellising, weeding, and harvesting different types of produce. We planted around 150 Padron peppers, two hoop houses were filled with tomatoes, another hoop house had cucumbers, ginger, and turmeric. There was also a constant supply of salad greens, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cabbage. In addition to using the crops cultivated on the farm we also harvested naturally occurring natives growing in the fields. We gathered red clover flowers and elderberry flowers and dried them to prepare them for tea to sell at the farmer's market.

During the other three days of the week I would be working on the other 245 acres of the farm. 200 acres of the land is a wildlife refuge and the remaining 45 is used for a garden, fruit trees, and grazing fields for sheep. I aided in the daily rotational grazing of the sheep and worked on fencing improvements to one of their fields. In the garden I did typical garden tasks similar to the Harvest Table farm. I also finished creating an asparagus patch that has recently been started. In the wildlife refuge I typically performed routine trail maintenance. My main project on this part of the farm was creating a walkable trail that was just a deer trail at the beginning of the summer.