Kirsten, Shelagh, Tara, Jeff, Ben + Beardsley Farm= True Love

It is the beginning of another Americorps season and Beardsley Community Farm has three new members, Tara Dettmar, Kirsten Halverson and Shelagh Leutwiler, in addition to Ben Epperson, our site supervisor, and Jeff Martin a returning Americorps member. Here they are to introduce themselves.
Hello, I’m Tara Dettmar. I am currently interning on Beardsley Farm in order to finish up my degree in Outdoor Education from Warren Wilson College. I took an active interest in local foods and community organizing when I was in high School and continued through college where, for my senior thesis, I designed a program to educate people about the importance of community. When I heard about this Americorps position I was thrilled. It combined growing foods using organic practices, teaching community members about sustainable living and abiding in a beautiful area of the country, relatively close to home (Amelia Island, FL) and very close to my second home (Asheville, NC).

Hi, my name is Kirsten Halverson and I am excited to be working on Beardsley Farm this year! I graduated with a degree in English and French from Luther College in Decorah IA, where I first became interested in local food and sustainable agriculture after taking a capstone class labeled Food and the Environment. I got involved in the local farming community in Decorah by helping to organize a Local Food’s Night at our college’s cafeteria. I also worked on several farms that introduced me to aspects of Market Gardening and the CSA movement. Speaking of which, one of my favorite websites is localharvest.org, a great resource for finding local organic food in any area of the country. In addition of gardening I play violin, love to hike, swim and dance. I am looking forward to growing food all year and exploring all the nooks and crannies of a city at the same time!

Hello, I’m Shelagh Leutwiler, and I have lived in Knoxville for almost 4 years. I finished my degree with a Bachelor of Fine Art at UTK. I started volunteering at Beardsley Farms in the summer of 2006 when a friend told me about Beardsley Farm where I could learn more about plants and receive free produce in exchange for work. I loved volunteering so much that I decided to apply to work at the farm, so I joined Americorps. I sold my car after living in Knoxville for about 6 months and discovered the joy of bicycles. I work with friends to organize bike related events (4th of July ride and The Tour de Lights being a few). I just got back from a 24 hour bicycle race in Atlanta, where my all girl relay team placed second! I love goats and honeybees, vegetarian potlucks, baking bread, canoing on the Clinch River, backpacking in the Smoky Mountians, and riding my bike with my friends. I’m looking forward to The TN Valley Fair (demolition derby and a whole bunch of bunnies and goats!!!!), The Yard Dog Road Show, Tennessee Shines, and The Sidewalk Chalk Art Event, I’m organizing on Market Square on October 4th!

After a week of Americorps orientation, training, and service we arrived at our work site, the beautiful, Beardsley Community Farm. We are becoming familiar with the many tasks we accomplish weekly at the farm. Besides caring for the plants, returning Americorps member, Jeff, and farm manager, Ben, have shown us where we donate our produce and where we pick up the materials to compost. We enjoy harvesting in the mornings and organizing our harvested vegetables and herbs into gifts that we drive to our different donation locations. We are also picking up compost on these trips from really awesome businesses in town like our favorite restaurant The Tomato Head, favorite grocery, The Three Rivers Food Co-op. It’s been really satisfying to see how happy everyone is when we show up to give them gifts of beautiful fresh food, or come to haul away their food scraps to convert it into compost.

The highlights of last week were planting new fall crops, lettuce, carrots, radish, collards and kale. We also got to rob our bees of their honey. It was a new experience for us and really exciting to learn the process of extracting honey from our friends the bees.

Extracting the honey was quite a process. First we donned our large white bee suits so we would not get stung. We learned that blowing smoke at the bees calms them down, though no one quite knows why. After smoking the bees we removed the supers, or boxes, from the hives, looking into them to make sure we did not remove any of the supers that had larvae in them. Once we had determined which boxes were dripping full of honey, Paul, a UT Grad student who had come to help up for the day used a leaf blower to blow most of the bees out of the supers. We quickly brought them into the barn and shut the door so the angry buzzing bees would not be able to find and punish us for stealing their honey! Inside we had set up a table with a filter box, a hot knife, and our honey extractor. Bees store their honey in cells of wax and when a cell is full they cap it off with another layer of wax. In order to get to the delicious honey we had to cut that wax cap off. So, the first step was to remove the frames from the super and, using the hot knife, cut the caps off the honey comb. Next we inserted nine frames into our honey extractor, put the top on and began spinning the frames to force the honey out of the comb, letting it drip to the bottom of the extractor where it poured through a spigot into large gauge filter. When one bucket was full we poured the honey through a small gauge nylon filter and we had ten gallons of a very yummy finished product!

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