Carleton Student Farm

We are a small vegetable farm located on Carleton College's campus in Northfield, Minnesota. We use organic practices to the best of our ability and sell all of our produce to Bon Appetit, Carleton's food service provider. For the season of 2014 our interns are Brynna Mering '16 and Connor Rohwer '17. For blog posts from years before 2014 check out carletonstudentfarm.tumblr.com/

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Want to be a farm intern next year? Applications are due January 9th. Feel free to conact Brynna Mering, Connor Rohwer, or David Hougen-Eitzman (our Faculty advisor) with any questions about the internship or application.

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Northfield is expecting to get 3 to 8 inches of snow tomorrow, so we rushed to get the last of our turnips, beets, and cabbages out of the fields this afternoon. It was getting dark when I found this heart shaped turnip, so the picture quality is rather low, but I thought I should post it anyway since today was our final harvest of the season.

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Harvesting Pumpkins, a barrowful of insanely delicious watermelon, and feasting at Harvest Fest. 

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BEAUTIFUL CROPS

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It has been a busy fall, but things are finally starting to wind down. All of our squash and pumpkins are in, the kohlrabi has all been eaten (by our dear pal the wood chuck), and all that is left in the fields are some root vegetables, and the remains of out less frost hardy plants. To celebrate a fantastic season the farm will be collaborating with Farm House, Food Truth, Firebellies, and CANOE House to host Harvest Fest this Saturday. We will be working in the fields next to Farm House from 3 to 6, and there will be food and music to follow.

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School may have started and frost may be looming, but the Carleton farm stops for nothing. In case you were wondering, this pile contains over eleven hundred pounds of spaghetti squash, to give us a grand total of over fifteen hundred pounds sold this season. I don't think saying squash for dayz quite covers that...

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The first picture is of some gorgeous heirlooms saved from the doom of an impending frost that never came (thank goodness). The second picture is of some of our produce being grilled by Firebellies at the Carleton Food Fest, which was a grand success. 

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Real Perty 

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A whole heck-of-a-lot of yummy produce we sold to the dining halls

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Here are a load of photos that we have had stored up since the end of the summer. These are a couple we took of a hawk that deeply appreciated our fence. 

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New Student Week Fun

Today was a great day for the farm. We led two very successful tours for new students and their parents, and shared our first watermelon at the sustainability office table in the welcome tent. Despite all the excitement of meeting and showing around new students, there is still lots of work to be done. Thanks to the help of a few volunteers we had our had our biggest sale of paste tomatoes yet at 129.1 pounds. We also collected quite a few new names for the farming club e-mail list and are looking forward to having some more volunteers out at the farm soon.

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Zucchini bread for days.

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Snow peas are hard to pick efficiently because you end up eating most of them as you harvest.   

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Check that green zebra. 

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Though we have mostly been blessed in our farming endeavors, we would be remiss if we did not mention some of our failings. Sometimes things don't grow so swell, like the paste tomatoes pictured above. No matter how much we love and care for them, they seem doomed to a life of struggle simply because they were planted in poorer quality soil. Such injustice! 

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Really, really, ridiculously good-looking eggplant for days.

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Snow peas and heirloom tomatoes (a bunch of brandywine and a solitary green zebra).