BOA agenda 121216 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Barry Katz: What are they going to be doing? What did you anticipate them doing? 1 2 Kara Brewer: Helping me with the flowers, flower harvesting and that sort of thing. General maintenance. 3 As the chestnuts come into maturity we’ll need help with the harvest. Just things like that. 4 5 Barry Katz: Ok. 6 7 Karen Barrows: Ok, Andy? 8 9 Andy Petesch: And I’ll just finish up a few things with Ms. Brewer here. I understand it’s already getting late 10 and I don’t want to slow this process down at all. But I do need to have her testify to a few more facts. So 11 we went ahead and talked about some of your farm plan specifics, if you could just discuss the agricultural 12 activities in a little more detail in terms of what you’re doing with the flowers? 13 14 Kara Brewer: Sure. So we are using the barn as the storage for the flowers. As we harvest the flowers we 15 come into the barn, we section everything out into our buckets, that’s where we wrap and put them in 16 bouquets or however it is that we’re going to do it. And so we will be storing the flowers in there as well. We 17 are doing you pick operations with the flowers as well so that’s part of everything. 18 19 Andy Petesch: And are you using any specific technique in terms of growing the seeds? 20 21 Kara Brewer: Yes. So I’m doing a technique called soil blocking. It’s actually really fascinating. Something 22 that they use in Europe quite a bit and what it does is it cuts down on your plastic waste. So when your 23 seed starting and we’ll be doing thousands of seed starts per season we start and you essentially block up 24 the soil and that’s the container that the seed germinates in so then when they’re ready we take that into 25 the barn and we have racks and growing lights available, and then we take that block directly out into the 26 field and plant it and because it’s in a block the transplant shock is much less as well. And like I said, we 27 have been experimenting a little bit on the property now just to see how the soil blocking method works and 28 it’s actually been doing really well compared to the direct seeding. So I’m excited about that as well. I think 29 that’s going to increase our flower production. 30 31 Barry Katz: You had quite a large area there where you’re going to grow flowers. Do you have any estimate 32 about how many blocks you would need to fill that up? 33 34 Kara Brewer: Thousands, yes. 35 36 Barry Katz: How many? 37 38 Kara Brewer: Thousands. Because just one bed is 70 foot by 4 bed, depending on the type of flower and 39 depending on the spacing of course it varies. It could be anywhere from 400 to 900 plants in just one bed. 40 41 Barry Katz: The size of the plot was 70 by what? 42 43 Kara Brewer: Each bed is going to be 70 by 4. 44 45 Barry Katz: So that’s 280 square feet. 46 47 Kara Brewer: Yeah. And that’s roughly. I mean in some areas. 48 48