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Last week was a fun one! We were excited to welcome site hosts, the Piedmont Middle School Green Team, out to the farm for a tour of the Orchard.
Our compost operation was a topic of particular interest to the very engaged group of middle schoolers. Already versed in the nitrogen and carbon cycles from their course work, the tour focused on how our farm production practices sequester carbon. Our composting, the 30,000 trees in our orchard, and all the grasses (weeds to many a conventional farmer) that we let grow up in the orchard rows were examples of how our production practices act as a carbon sink.
As a visual aid, the group walked over to the apple block of the orchard. They were able to see the stark contrast between our farm, full of trees and the thick vegetative cover of the grasses in our interows, and our corn growing neighbors farm whose fields are completely barren – no cover crops, barely even a weed can be seen upon the rows of exposed soil.
The Green Team got to try their hand at harvesting and picked some of our Blood Oranges. We aren’t sure if there were any future farmers in the group, but we hope their field trip helped
put concepts that may seem abstract into real world terms.
On Saturday Becky and I had the pleasure of welcoming 11 members of the Mothers of Brentwood group to casa Courchesne for a cooking class. Becky demonstrated how to make an absolutely scrumptious Meyer Lemon cake, citrus compote, and a Clementine granita. We all got to try our hand at “supreming” citrus, a technique which removes all the white membranes of the citrus. This renders the fruit glossy, beautiful, and perfect to act as a stunning accompaniment to cakes, ice cream, or other pastries.
It was a real treat to learn from our baking wizard some tricks of the trade for making the moistest and quite possibly the most delicious citrus cake this eater has ever encountered.
