Growing Power: Iron St. Farm

So for yesterday's (Tuesday 6/11/13) class session, our IPRO visited Growing Power's Iron Street Farm. Here's the link to Iron St. Farm's website: CLICK ME. The farm wasn't too far away from campus and it wasn't all that complicated to get there at all. We simply followed 35th St westward until we arrived Iron St. I'm writing this a day after we went visited, so most of the things I experienced there I remember pretty well. But the feeling of intrigue and excitement has dissipated a bit. Don't get me wrong, Iron St. Farm was impressive but I wish I could have written this last night so this post would be a better reflection of my feelings. I'm sure if I were to go back again I would be just as amazed as I was yesterday.

This is the mural on the side of the building! Painted by youth!

Great things comes in little packages and Iron St. Farm is just that. Granted, the lot they are located on is a pretty sizable one, they are doing GREAT and AWESOME things and not even using up the entire space yet. I even capitalized the words to emphasize my point. Comparable to the size of the lot, there is a lot of powerful things going on at Iron St. which amazed me. We were given a tour of the place by two of the staff there.

We learned about compost and the process used to make compost. They had these two structures where the compost would sit and as well as a large hoop house with a large stack of compost inside. It was amazing to see the number of plants growing on site as well. I also just want to mention now that a few days ago when I was reading the required articles for week 1, there were some mention of chickens being raised on urban farms. After reading that, I started to do some research on chickens because... I want one. Anyways, I thought that was really funny when our tour guides showed us the chicken coop they were in the process of building. I want a chicken really bad now.

How could you say no to this?

Other livestock on the site were goats! They were miniature goats and they were so cute! I wanted to take one home with me. They baa'd and everything. I gathered myself quickly before I started my goat-napping career.

The goats on the farm!

We then moved inside to learn about how mushrooms were being grown on site. I was very intrigued at how this was being done. I wish I could explain it here so you could understand why I was so intriguied; but I'm not entirely sure I'd be 100% correct in explaining it. All you need to know is that it was really cool and that mushrooms take a really long time to grow.

These mushrooms were really cool looking.

They also had some fish! It was dark, I didn't really see them but still, animals = cool. I should find a new word to describe things other than the word cool. My favorite part of the whole place was the worms and worm farm so to speak. They're used for vermicomposting! I just Googled that to make sure it was correct--and yes Google is now a verb. Also, new fun and crazy word learned today: VERMICULTURE. This is the use of worms to create what I like to call super-fertilizer. That's probably not the technical name for it, but this fertilizer was pretty awesome. I immediately wanted to have one running on UFarmIIT. Erika explained the process of vermicomposting and afterwards we got to sieve some dirt. It was a lot more fun than it sounds.

Afterwards, our IPRO team sat down and discuss some business regarding the organization and goals for the team. I was glad we did even though we did run a few minutes over class time and it was super hot inside the building. Good things to come!