t turns out that there may be some good old fashioned clay on the Meyer Farm.  So we got a shovel and a bucket and dug some up.  We found two different types of clay on the farm.  One of them is a seam of glacial till that sits atop what seems to be an abundance of sand.  It’s pretty hard to say how much is actually there, because there are no plans to excavate enormous quantities of the green/blue stained “golden till”, but there seems to be a great plenty.

There is also a deposit of jet-black, inky-clay-soil next to a slough that runs along one boundary of the farm, that probably gets is color and plasticity from decaying plants and leaves.  This clay is a little harder to get to than what we have dubbed the “green hole” and we have not gone gangbusters on using it because it is in a riparian zone, or swampy wetland kind of spot, and being semi-environmentalists and all, we recognize that it is not a prime harvesting zone.

      Digging clay is a little bit of fun, heavy, sticky, and messy which makes the practice a prime “sharing opportunity”.  A few weeks ago three of Dom’s students from MCTC came to the farm to help dig some clay in exchange for wood fired pizza.  The pizza was good and all but their help on the farm was remarkable.  We learned a few things too.  Things like just because you can cook a pizza in 70 seconds does not mean that you should (they tend to be better if your oven is cool enough to let them “cook” in there for at least 90 seconds), not everyone likes Yak on their pizza, and one 30 gallon plastic barrel filled with clay is too heavy for five people to lift regardless of how much pizza they eat.