Compost your food scraps for free this month at any Martha's Vineyard transfer station.
His passion is soil, but his career has been inside greenhouses.
Now, as the new manager of the former Thimble Farm property in Oak Bluffs, Keith Wilda will get to do both.
“I have the best of both worlds,” he said in a brief interview following a tour for Island farmers of the property owned by Island Grown Initiative.
Mr. Wilda moved to the Island full time two weeks ago with his wife and twin two-year old daughters to run Island Grown Farms.
A vocal gathering of Vineyard farmers heard about plans for a campus-style educational agricultural center during a tour of the former Thimble Farm property this week.
Sponsored by the Island Grown Initiative, which bought the 40-acre farm in the center of the Island last year, the tour sparked a lively discussion among some 30 growers about how best to encourage growth and also ensure survival for the burgeoning network of small farms on the Island that operate with little or no subsidy. Opinion was far from unanimous.
Island Grown Initiative announced preliminary plans this week for a campus-style farm center at the former Thimble Farm Property, including a refurbished greenhouse, parcels of land for tenant farmers and a slaughterhouse facility.
At the farm network’s annual farmers’ dinner on Monday night, executive director Sarah McKay laid out the organization’s initial plans for the historic agricultural property.
The Island Grown Initiative, the nonprofit farm and sustainability network, announced an $800,000 capital campaign this week to build the Vineyard’s first U.S. Department of Agriculture permitted slaughterhouse.
In an interview with the Gazette this week, IGI president Sarah McKay and Island Grown Meat coordinator Richard Andre said the organization is considering two locations for a 3,500 square foot facility – Thimble Farm or behind the new barn at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society in West Tisbury.
Thimble Farm, 40 acres of fertile farmland in the center of the Vineyard whose future has been uncertain for the better part of the last year, will be saved as a working farm.
Flowers come in all different shapes and sizes, but rarely do they come in the form of small children.
“Today you’re an apple flower,” Melinda Rabbit DeFeo, of Island Grown Schools, said as her student petals stood around her in Chilmark earlier this week. The Edgartown fourth grade had traveled to the home of Peter Norris to pick apples and learn how they grow.
