Thank you so much for supporting the 2023 Good Earth FundISU Campaign! Your gift helped our Good Earth community grow food that fights food insecurity on the Iowa State University campus. In our 2023 season, we donated 3,618 pounds of fresh produce to The S.H.O.P., Iowa State's food pantry. Our student farmers were able to harvest 1,748 additional pounds of produce to feed themselves as well.

This year, we’re taking our efforts to make healthy produce available for more community members a step further by adding an additional high tunnel. Please consider supporting our 2024 season with a gift at https://fundisu.foundation.iastate.edu/goodearth24 and help us feed the Iowa State University community. Thank you!  

Thank you, donors, for helping us reach over 50% of our goal so far! We are extremely grateful! Only 15 days left!!

Because of you, we were able to purchase hay/straw to lay down as a weed barrier in our 1st high tunnel and thick plastic weed barriers for our 2nd high tunnel! This greatly reduces the amount of time we will have to spend weeding by hand throughout our 2023 season, allowing us to spend more time cultivating our crops! 

Your contributions are enabling us to empower individuals to contribute to a more equitable and resilient food landscape, as well as helping us make progress toward our mission to ensure food security through sustainable, fresh produce for our ISU community. We’re excited that you’ve chosen to help us along our journey and hope for a long and fruitful relationship. Thanks again!  

We've planted the rest of our marigolds in our first high tunnel! We installed our irrigation lines in our second high tunnel, along with more weeding, and adding another 2 rows of trellis to our viney entrance!

In our second high tunnel, we plan to have sweet potatoes, beans, tomatoes, okra, quinoa, watermelon, bitter melon, slicing cucumbers, and squash! In company with a variety of peppers, tomatillos, eggplants, herbs, and flowers!

A lot is planned for our next farm shift. We plan on putting down fertilizer, cardboard, irrigation tape, weed barrier, and plastic in our second high tunnel! We are so excited to have more crops starting to grow here soon! 

We truly can’t thank you enough for your generous gifts to our FundISU GESF 2023 campaign. Your support will allow us to continue providing low-cost resources to the people in our community who need them most. People like you truly make a difference in the world, and we’re incredibly grateful!

We got all the remaining flats for out of the agronomy greenhouse and took them to a shade house for hardening at the horticulture farm. We also mowed and worked on weeding parts of the soon-to-be sweet potato-bean-tomato-watermelon-quinoa bed!

We’ve been prepping the ground for sweet potatoes and turtle beans to be interplanted together. The sweet potatoes grow underground while their edible vines grow above ground as a ground cover. The turtle beans will grow above the sweet potato vines and help fix nitrogen in the soil for the sweet potatoes! 

Our other high tunnel is blooming with filled herbs, lettuce, and broccoli!

Thank you, Sarah, for continuing to water nightly! There have been LOTS of honeybees swarming our plants!

Some of our starts didn't get hearty, but we saved over 1k starting our own seeds, as 65% were still strong and viable! 

It was a gorgeous day to start prepping our 2023 Sweet Potato Bed! Sweet potatoes are highly nutritious and contain dietary fiber, naturally occurring sugars and complex carbohydrates, protein, vitamins A and C, iron, and calcium, making them a great addition to our farm! 

Our amazing student farmers were also able to move more cattle panels and pound t-posts into the ground for our viney-friends, such as tomatoes and watermelons, to grow on!

Along with other high tunnel prep work, we weeded between the rabbit barrier and the high tunnel, located recycled cardboard to use under our white weed barrier walkways, and decided to create an arch for our vines to grow on! We look forward to watching our lively entrance flourish during this growing season!

Thank you, everyone, for your continuous work in making this growing season incredible!

Thank you to everyone who came and helped out! We accomplished setting up 100 ft of cattle panel trellis for our long Chinese red noodle beans. In addition, 100 ft of alternating tomatillo, basil, tomato, and marigold were planted! 

Thank you, Brandon, for donating the lettuce seedlings that we were able to plant in row 8!

The transplants looked great after being planted! We're growing with more excitement, along with our growing plants! After an immensely successful transplant shift, using the greenhouse seedlings we started in April, we watered for 2.5 hours using drip irrigation.

Thank you, Kealy, for providing snacks and drinks for everyone on our shift! 

We had the pleasure of getting help from an ISU student organization known as IAAS (International Agricultural and Related Sciences Club). IAAS came as part of their ‘Motivational Day’ where they visit a local farm or agricultural business. Our Farm Manager Sarah gave them a presentation detailing our club and what we have done in the past, followed by a tour of the Horticulture Research Station.

With the help of IAAS, we planted kale, bok choy, leeks, and two varieties of endive in the first of many rows in our high tunnel! After lunch, our group continued working by bringing over and lining up cattle panels in our high tunnel. Growing some plants vertically requires support, and cattle panels are a simple and affordable solution to keep our plants off the ground.

Thank you IAAS for taking the time to learn more about our club and helping us start directly sowing our plants into the high tunnel for our 2023 growing season!

Thankfully, a lot was accomplished so the April Showers didn’t impact our rained-out shifts! The high tunnel which we rent out at the ISU Horticulture Research Station is held in place by upright posts driven 2-3 feet into the ground. The hoops, that create our controlled environment, rest on top of the soil and are secured with anchors. This provides enough stability to withstand wind storms, which is especially important for our flat state of Iowa!

Upon arrival at our high tunnel, the seedbed had been tilled and weeded. We decided to reserve a second high tunnel right next to the original for potatoes and other companion plants this season! Next, we put the greenhouse covers on over the hoops and moved weed barriers and sandbags from the storage shed into our high tunnels. After, we placed and stapled in the weed barriers. Not only will the weed barriers prevent weeds but they will also reduce sources for insects and diseases!

The 11th Annual Graduate and Professional Student Conference was on Wednesday, April 12th, 2023, in the Memorial Union at ISU. This free opportunity allows graduate and professional students to highlight their work and experiences while practicing their presentation skills. The theme was Cultivating Our Graduate Community. 

Our graduate students were able to present all we do here in Good Earth Student Farm to a larger ISU community! Thank you to everyone who took the time to listen and learn more about what our organization does and what we stand for.

The process through which a new plant develops from its seed is called seed germination. Since the lights in the greenhouse have been turned on our growing organisms have begun the germination process! We've seen cotyledons (the embryonic leaf in seed-bearing plants) on several plants, including cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, Bok choi, Swiss chard, basil, bees' friend, leeks, nasturtium, Chinese cabbage, and we've seen true leaves on almost all of our plants! These leaves will perform photosynthesis so the plants can start making their own food. 

Another important step in our food production system is succession planting. We use succession planting as a food production method to extend harvest season and maximize yield through strategic planning! This is done by staggering the propagation of our plants. We have begun propagating additional flats for this 2023 growing season. Our student farmers greatly benefit from this food production method because it provides a consistent supply of farm fresh produce!

We were excited to host our first seed-sowing event on Thursday, March 23rd, at the greenhouse at 935 N University Boulevard! We planted 46 different seed varieties and a total of around 3,800 seeds! Everyone should feel very proud of their efforts. There was a lot of laughing and friendships being formed!

Not only did we work hard to acquire and plant a wide diversity of seeds this 2023 season, but we also worked smart. Here’s a brief rundown of what we did:

1. Accounted for all seeds and organized them into an efficient planting order. 

2. Gently broke up and hand-mixed our potting soil.

3. Filled flats  ¾ full of soil and began seeding by hand. 

4. Lightly filled the flats with a top-soil layer and then left the seeds to be soaked in water overnight to jumpstart germination.

The seeds we planted are now happily in our greenhouse and watered in. The greenhouse shelters our young seedlings from the wind, rain, and cold! Putting our seedlings in a greenhouse allows us to control the temperature and humidity. This is an important step in our food production system because we can grow our seeds earlier in the year without the worry of the elements reducing our yield!

A special thank you to our Farm Intern Ashton for continuing to water those seedlings daily, and a special shoutout to our Farm Manager Sarah for completing the Produce Safety Grower Certificate Training! 

Although the certificate is not required for GESF, it allows us to be on the same level as the commercial growers at the Research Station, where our plants will be transplanted. The knowledge gained through earning this certificate keeps GESF better informed on produce safety best practices while sharing a space with those covered by FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act covering produce).

Thank you, everyone, for your efforts and for supporting Good Earth Student Farms' mission toward sustainable food security here on campus! We greatly look forward to growing together for this next season!