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What is Red Wiggler and what do you do here?
Red Wiggler is a farm; a non-profit
organic vegetable farm, and we employ adults with developmental disabilities,
have an education service learning program, and a CSA
and all of our programs are run through the lens of environmental stewardship
and my name is Kara Desmond,
and I'm the deputy director.
What is the CSA and what does it do?
The CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. What that means is customers buy
a share of food at the beginning of the season and come each week to pick it up. What that allows us to do is have the money up front to buy
seeds, pay people, buy tools, maintain equipment
and get the season started. It's a great model for customers
because they get to come to the farm each week and share in the harvest.
Every week for a 26 week season, customers come,
they pick up their vegetables, they can go out to our Pick-Your-Own, and pick flowers and
herbs; and they pay up front and then just come each week
to pick up their vegetables. Okay. What is a growing and harvesting cycle
like? Sure, so we are growing
vegetables almost year round now thanks to our greenhouse
so we grow micro-greens in the winter in the greenhouse, in the spring we plant
all of our spring crops, like kale, and collards,
and beets, and carrots, as well as
onions, potatoes, and peas. We
also started growing in our greenhouses as early as
March the tomato and eggplants and pepper plants that will all
go out later in the season so we spent a lot in this spring in the
greenhouse planting things outside and then we'll start harvesting in
May and continue harvesting outside through November
What do you do or use to maintain an environmentally friendly farm?
So we are certified organic
some of the techniques we use to ensure
we are sustainable and environmentally friendly are
things like crop rotations, we move our crops from
field to field so that the same family of crops
Isn't in the same field for 3-5 years, what that allows for is it gives the
soil a chance to regenerate some of the nutrients that are lost
certain types of vegetables growing there we also
use a lot of cover crop to make sure that we are eliminating the risk
of erosion and runoff
we don't use a lot of synthetic chemicals for pesticide and herbicide
What we do for pesticide is a lot of hand-picking
Bugs off of plants, we cover things so that the bugs just can't get to them
To begin with. For irrigation, we do have an irrigation system
we only use it when there hasn't been enough rain
But we monitor the rain closely to make sure that we're not
over watering the plants and wasting the water. There are a lot of things we do that are
Environmentally friendly
Some of them are because we're certified organic, and then others
are choices that we make to be a sustainable farm.
What are the benefits of organic farming for our health?
The benefits of organic farming for our health, especially for people working at the farm
means that we're not exposed to the chemicals
that are being used
There's lots of different research out there about pesticides and herbicides
that are used on conventional farms.
Most of the time what I've read is that
the impact could be there
but it's especially an issue for the people growing the food around the chemicals
so it's really important to us that our people that work here
aren't exposed to those chemicals.
How does Red Wiggler bring the community together?
So our name is Red Wiggler Community Farm and we strive to bring people together
in lots of different ways and we also try and create as inclusive an environment
as possible. Including people with or without disabilities
youth and adults. So we have events on the farm, we
make sure that our vegetables are
being distributed to you a wide variety of people. Not only people that
can afford our CSA but also people receiving services from our food center and we also
deliver food or vegetables within the county.
We encourage lots of service learning for students
and opportunities for people to come out to the farm and be a part of the community.