Peppers! By Celeste Monke
‘Tis the season. Temperatures are high and the hothouse fruits are fruiting. This furry fellow still has some days to go, but should turn into a spicy 2” beast with a heat level somewhere between Serranos and Cayenne. A furry pepper you ask? Yes. It’s a Rocoto pepper, from the Andean highlands species Capsicum pubescens […]
Participatory Pollinators by Eli
My initial idea for an intern project for the year was to keep mason bees in home-made nests and try to overwinter them on the farm. If it was successful the farm could possibly reduce or eliminate the honeybee hives we pay to bring in each spring, thereby internalizing some cost and becoming more self-reliant. […]
The Compost Post by Michael Deitering
Here at Cloud Mountain, many hours have been dedicated to discussing how to improve the soils, and what improvement even means. By organic standards, the goal is to “manage plant and animal materials to maintain or improve soil organic matter content in a manner that does not contribute to contamination of crops…”. On way to […]
Orchard Groundcover Project, By Janaki Kilgore
As an intern at Cloud Mountain Farm Center I have the privilege to consider the big picture of dynamic food systems, sustainability and community. The focus on long-term well-being of the farm and the watershed it inhabits must consider soil health as the backbone of management practices if sustaining community and ecosystem health is a […]
Internship Go!
Our 2014 interns have arrived, and we’re already through the first two weeks of the thirty-five exciting weeks of education! The interns engage in one full day of education each week while doing correlating work on the farm the other four days. In these first few weeks we have been busy introducing overviews of some […]
An old fruit most people have never tried: Quince
As autumn deepens, we’re all enjoying the fall harvest; apples and pears, winter squash, cider and quince… What the heck is quince??? Quince is a very old fruit, closely related to pears. It is native to Southeast Asia, mainly Turkey and Iran, but has been grown Europe and the United Kingdom for centuries as well. […]