Crop Rotations

Another great day. Today we took the morning and part of the afternoon as a learning day. The subject: crop rotations. I've heard the principles many many times before, but Ali, Leslie, and Jeff did an excellent job of going into the gritty details of how to pull off designing a good crop rotation given all the different competing constraints under consideration. (alliteration anyone?) More than giving us a good basis in the theory, they explained exactly how they had come up with the current and past rotations for our farm, and how they had changed it in response to observing the fields throughout the season (e.g. what they did when they noticed one field stays damp most of the year, etc..).

After all that I spent a while researching air conditioner thermostats in the hopes of learning how to hack a room air conditioner into something we can use to refrigerate a cool room. Anyone know anything about recalibrating thermostats? (Taking a look under the hood I discovered that the thermostat has a little Allan key driven screw that I suspect adjusts the temperature calibration. I'd need to change it so that the air conditioner keeps the temperature around 4 degrees Celsius.)

I then spent a long while with Amanda and Ali stringing twine from the roof of the back half of the green house so that we can tether the tomatoes. There's a nifty we knot used to adjust the slack of the twine as the plant grows so that you can keep wrapping it around the stalk. It's something like the Lobster Bouy Hitch or the Tautline Hitch.