Aurelias Garden

08/05/2024

Another gorgeous morning at the farm... It's been a great year for cabbages and we just transplanted a few hundred more cabbage and cauliflower seedlings for our fall harvest!

             
             

07/12/2024

And just like that, BAM, the garlic is harvested and spread out over various locations around the farm to cure! The winner this year is Romanian Red - a variety we started trialing 3 seasons ago. Bogatyr from is also a standout every year for us even before .garden was formed! We also love and . We try to grow at least 10 different varieties each year for diversity and to trial - it may be time to and focus on the ones that have consistently performed the best for us!

07/07/2024

.garden ! Nothing would get done if we all operated autonomously! This hard working crew of sure knows how to get the job done... TOGETHER!

06/24/2024

Lots of progress today in the delightful misty morning (ok, it poured for a bit but who's counting?!)! Starting to feel like we are ALMOST caught up with planting - and ALMOST time for succession planting! Today we seeded another big row of carrots, got some more mulching done, and prepared for a HUGE day of planting tomorrow!

06/22/2024

After an exhausting week of high heat and wicked humidity, the farm is in full swing! With still a bit more planting to do, we are finally over the biggest hump of field prep! Our harvests are going strong, and cover cropped areas are buzzing with buckwheat, daikon and peas in bloom! .martin.315428 is sporting one of our super handy new harvest bags from as she heads off to pick about 15lbs of delicious sugar snap peas! Susan and are pictured harvesting !

Some victories this year include the incredibly low presence of leaf minor on pur Swiss Chard and beets thanks to diligent scouting and removal for the past few years. Another is finally getting w**ds under control in our onion rows and lower crab grass pressure!!! Hard work pays off folks - in w**d management and in pest control. Stay vigilant and take action immediately - learn the life cycles of your pests and w**ds and prioritize efforts to strike at the right time with the right tool! More to come this year on what we have learned over 9 years of trial and error!

PSA: Heat stress is real and all of your farmers here in the Northeast have been through the wringer this week. This exhausted is writing this with heavy eyelids, grateful to finally have some rain and respite from the grueling heat.

PLEASE pay a farmer's market a visit this weekend and BUY SOMETHING! Get the last of the magnificent crop of strawberries we've enjoyed this year or the first of the sugar snap peas or anything else in between!
.garden

04/19/2024

A gorgeous day and huge THANK YOU to for celebrating with us and helping us get a jump on some spring tasks! 1300 onions and 300 cabbage seedlings are in the ground! We also poured some much needed love (i.e. compost and mulch) on our !

03/23/2024

Join us in the field as a volunteer farmer this season and help us grow food for our local food pantries! Opportunities exist in Medway and Wayland Ma!

Aurelia's Garden is a nonprofit ALL volunteer organization started in 2020 to address the growing food insecurity in Massachusetts. We operate 2 farming sites and donate approximately 12,000 lbs of...

03/23/2024

Join us in the field to volunteer as a farm for the day! Spring is in the air and we are already breaking ground to plant our crops for the season!

Aurelia's Garden is a nonprofit ALL volunteer organization started in 2020 to address the growing food insecurity in Massachusetts. We operate 2 farming sites and donate approximately 12,000 lbs of...

02/19/2024

Food Security means a lot of things, but all these 'things' have a common denominator. That is 'access to resources'. Food INsecurity is not a stand-alone problem. It is tied to an overarching INability - due to power imbalances - to access adequate resources of all kinds: money, land, education, self-determination, social standing, to name just a few.

Sharing resources we have access to that others don't is a small - LOCAL - but powerful act we cam take to redistribute some of the power imbalances within our own communities.

We are deeply grateful to for their generous donation of seeds for our 2 farming sites! Not only will we be able to plant many of these, we will also share many of these with the clients of our food pantry partners through our Resource and Seed Sharing Initiative!

01/18/2024

We absolutely love working with the Medway Village Food Pantry! They have been a wonderful partner since our very first growing season in 2020! As food insecurity continues to rise, this pantry has gone from serving 206 households in 2021 to 723 households from 39 towns in 2023 distributing 190,836 lbs of produce! Not only that, but they fulfilled 1398 grocery orders through the Medway Public School system! We are awed at how they work to care for their community!

Our work is in part supported by incredibly generous funding from the Foundation For MetroWest as is Medway Village Food Pantry's!

✨Community Partner Spotlight✨

Aurelias Garden is an organization of volunteers that grow fresh and nutritious produce to donate to people in need to address local food insecurity. They have fields at Medway Community Farm that they farm and the food is donated to local food pantries. We are incredibly grateful to be one of the food pantries that benefit from their hard work and generosity.

Our pantry is committed to providing consistent access to culturally-preferred foods for our non-English speaking clients. A critical piece of this is working with Aurelia’s Garden and the Medway Community Farm to adjust the crops they grow to meet this need.

We want our clients to have a choice of foods they recognize from their own cultures, presented alongside all the other foods at the pantry, as part of an inclusive and dignified shopping experience.

Support for this project provided in part by the MetroWest Health Foundation, who recently awarded us a generous grant for this purpose. We are very grateful to the Foundation for helping us to do this important work.

We thank Aurelia’s Garden for their support and look forward to our partnership in 2024!

01/04/2024

Some treasures slumbering at Patterson's Field, our Wayland site! We have several rows planted with nutritious greens for harvesting later this winter when the daylight lengthens a bit more!


And, we also are getting ready for a native plant sale later this soring/summer! We have grown all of these northeast native plants from seed! Right now, their pots are nestled into a nice bed of mulch, which will protect their roots throughout the winter cold! We can't wait to share this new adventure with you this spring!

12/31/2023

Happy New Year from Aurelia's Garden to all of you! Thank you for an incredible year and opportunity to grow food for our community! We are so excited for 2024, our FIFTH year farming in Wayland and Medway! Have a safe and joyful new year!

11/12/2023

Preparing for our final main season distribution this week to our partners and this year, we have been busy all season growing, harvesting and drying many herbs such as this gorgeous parsley! With temperatures finally dipping into the low 20s, we have harvested the last of our open field grown and spent the weekend getting them into these cute packages! Also being packed up is , , , , leaf, and !

10/02/2023

Nighttime temps will be above 50 with sunny, warm days ahead this week! So many cropshave a lot to givebur after the cold, rainy September we had, need a little support to give their one last burst of energy to fruit production! It was a gorgeous day to be doing very thorough foliar feeding/microbial inoculations! Also got the last of our beneficial nematodes down on a few small problem areas where we observed some pepper maggot damage

09/30/2023

We are grateful for the opportunity to support the efforts of the Medway Village Food Pantry! Facing ever increasing numbers of families facing food insecurity, this pantry has done a wonderful job rising to meet their community's needs!

Tomorrow is the last day of Hunger Action Month, so we wanted to share a quick recap.

We have had quite the September! In the first four weeks of September, we served 568 households. Tomorrow morning we estimate that will serve another 110 to finish the month around 678 households. For comparison, we served 383 households in September 2022, a 77% increase year over year.

We distributed close to 21,000 lbs. of food and personal care items this month, which included a bounty of fresh produce from our community partners Medway Community Farm, Aurelias Garden, St. Thomas the Apostle, Medfield Community Garden, and Broken Fork Farm featuring Mel's Plant Stand. In September 2022, we distributed 15,763 lbs.

We also experienced our busiest day ever with the exception of the Saturday before Christmas last year when we distributed toys.

This month, we also welcomed new volunteers and celebrated our 2023 President’s Volunteer Service Award recipients. 🥳

The months ahead will be challenging, but we have an amazing group of volunteers who will make sure our clients are cared for and our shelves are stocked.

09/18/2023

Rainy days are perfect for planting and harvesting! The last of our fall lettuce seedlings are in the ground! It has been a very challenging growing season for farmers all over the region and we are no exception. Complete crop failures and successes alike are fodder for deep thought and planning for next year. We are taking stock of crops that have done well for us for the past four years across all sorts of changing weather patterns, including this year, and will use that to plan for increased efficiency and harvests next season! Planting more of some things and a lot less of others, cutting sunk costs and going with things that work! and of ALL sorts including I'm sure I'm forgetting something!

Crops we will take a break from include broccoli, cauliflower, many types of squash (but not all)

Crops we will continue to experiment with varieties and planting dates include cucumbers, zucchini, kohlrabi, bok choy, winter greens ...

09/17/2023

We love our and we love our to carrots are really starting to come on strong and so is our basil! (Pic #3 is just ONE stem of basil!) Another great harvest sent to yesterday included about 16 pounds of fresh basil! We are excited to be growing and basil varieties from and happy to report we have ZERO presence of (basil downey mildew) on any of the four varieties spread over 3 planting dates!

08/29/2023

Stages of a timeline

We have been working to improve the quality of the produce we donate since we began farming at Patterson's Field 4 years ago. An unexpected and generous donation from the Gilson Family Foundation after our first year allowed us to begin constructing this pavilion/wash station. Serving as command center for field operations, the pavilion also serves as our station for preparing harvests for distribution. After sending a handful of our volunteers for Food Safety Handling training (thanks to a grant at Cornell that allowed farms to send staff to their FSMA training for free last year) we decided to go the distance and install a full wash station. As a charity organization, we are protected by Samaritan laws and are not held to the same standards as farmers selling their produce. But that didn't sit well with us, so we began planning an off-grid system to treat and sanitize water from the brook running alongside the field. (We have no electricity or running water at this site!) It's taken some time and a few fundraising rounds to get here, but today we were able to get our water bank, faucets and plumbing all hooked up to our solar powered, 12V treatment system!! We even finally have gutters to capture the rain into a few rain barrels! We are almost there!

Next step is to fully run the system and get some water tests to verify the purification system is working as we need it to! SOPs are at the ready... stay tuned! -Hannah T, President and farm manager

03/07/2023

We had a beautiful sunny day at Patterson’s field today! As we worked to inventory our seed-starting supplies, we stripped off our outer layers and soaked up the beaming sun. There was a thick coat of ice on the neighboring field that we walk through to get to our farm. At 9am, the ice was solid so people who showed up early left no footprints. By the time we left, we all sunk into the snow.

11/29/2022

We’d like you to join us in celebrating ! Thanks to our hardworking volunteer workforce and generous support from last year’s donors, we’ve managed to exceed our goals and grow 11188 pounds of fresh local produce that we donated to four different food pantries so far this year. Please consider a donation to Aurelia’s Garden for . Link to the contributions page on our website is in our bio.

11/22/2022

What a year it has been! Here is a short of our work last Tuesday prepping for our delivery where we donated over 600 lbs to ! Also on the same day, we exceeded our seasonal goal of delivering 10000 lbs to food pantries this year!!! Many thanks to all of the workforce who helped to make this happen!

11/20/2022

Whew! Look at this gorgeous produce! A wonderful week delivering over 1000 pounds of our nutritious, organically grown produce to our food pantry partners and ! Both of these organizations do incredible work getting food to the growing population of food insecure community members in Eastern Massachusetts!

for the solid core of dedicated and passionate that make up the entirety of our organization and mission possible!

11/03/2022

We had some gorgeous fall weather earlier this week for cleaning up and our pepper patch and sowing some that will get an early start in Spring. Even though our frost-sensitive crops are done for this season, we're still producing some pretty hefty harvests of greens, root veggies, and tomatoes that had been ripening in the hoop house for donation to .

10/29/2022

Yesterday was a great day for harvesting !

10/05/2022

With the cooler weather setting in, we're noticing quite a few bees napping in the . It's also a good time to start saving seeds from these gorgeous blooms so we can plant more next year.

10/01/2022

We had beautiful Fall weather in Patterson's field on Friday morning for an abundant harvest gathered by a great group of volunteers!

09/10/2022

After all that rain we had earlier in the week, we entertained the company of several nice big frogs in our field and compost pile.

06/29/2022

What a beautiful day we had in Patterson's field today! After donating our 156 pound harvest of kale, collards, broccoli, cabbages, Swiss chard, escarole, peas, radishes, daikon, and lettuce to , we spent a few more hours on planting/transplanting, mulching, broadforking, and just observing the lovely insect critters hanging out on our cover crops and companion plants!

06/18/2022

We are so proud to work with our incredible partner, Open Table and the critical work they do to bring hunger relief to our community members who lack access to nutritious, locally grown, fresh produce! Thank you Open Table!

We are so thankful for all of our generous local farms for providing fresh vegetables to our clients! Happy National Eat Your Vegetables Day!

Gaining Ground Alcott Student Garden Aurelias Garden Mass Audubon Drumlin Farm Frank Scimone Farm Verrill Farm

06/08/2022

Today in Patterson's field: the harvest that we donated to and then, with the help of some interns from MMGA, we planted and mulched over 100 tomato plants!