Hawken farm: Friday

On friday, Stuart took the morning to do research on how he wants to plant the seeds in the beds in the garden. He did this by reading a book on plant companionship in order to better understand how different types of plants react with each other as well as the best way to place them in the beds. He took a lot of notes in order to document his thinking for future members of the hawken farm to be able to replicate his thoughts into the garden. I spent the whole morning rototilling the entire garden. This process took about two and a half hours. We did this in order to get the soil ready to plant seeds in. We first put down where we wanted the cardboard paths so that later we could place wood chips on top to suppress the weeds and mark out the paths. We rototilled the entire garden except for the 28 foot by 12 foot grazing area for the chickens, the cardboard paths, and already planted peas and onions. Some difficulties I had while rototilling was rototilling through the heavy grass and hay because it would get stuck in the rototiller. I had to clean the dirt and grass out of the rototiller multiple times throughout the morning. This was the tedious part of the morning. In the afternoon, Liam and I tried to construct a net that would cover the entire 28 foot by 12 foot grazing area. We put eyeholes into 10 foot pvc pipes and then ran a wire through all of them as well as weave the wire through the netting. We made the netting by taking two 4 foot by 50 foot plastic netting and cutting them into 25 foot strips and then zip tied them together. When we finished doing this, we moved the four posts to the four corners of the chicken coup grazing area but it was unsuccessful because there was no efficient way to connect the poles to the ground and the netting draped down into the chicken coup and was ineffective. The reason for attempting to do this netting was to try and protect the chickens from hawks on campus but we do not have the resources to accomplish that goal during our project.