The weekly log, v. 2: Wednesday

Up & at'em at 5:15! Yes ma'am, I was. We started work at 6:00 a.m. I was eager to do some planting, but instead, Kathleen & I dug potatoes... for six hours. And it wasn't bad really. Our speed apparently impressed our farm manager, Katherine (this does not happen. ever.), so it worked out well. And then lunch at 12:15! When I had planned to bottle kombucha... and it didn't happen then, but I ate loads of vegetables and some salmon, and my body said, "Thank you."

At 2:15 we started again in the greenhouse, processing more onions. This time I had a buddy, Kathleen again. I think we processed 7 1/2 pallets of yellow onions. We were set to get off work at 5:00 in order to make it to Waterpenny Farms for a potluck, but our small crew decided to stay back since we had to get to bed early. But instead of ending work at 5, we kept on until 6:45 in order to get all the tomatoes picked before the rain. Apparently the tomatoes will crack or get otherwise funky if you leave them out while it's raining. They were tasty.

With work finished, I skedaddled to the wash house to take a shower. I was so excited! My first shower since Saturday, and I'm pretty happy about it. I got my kombucha bottled, all 8 bottles of it, and will start another batch brewing before bed. Unfortunately, I cracked my beautiful & incredibly useful 3-gallon pickle jar, so for now I only have a small 1-gallon operation. I'm brewing quick & potent batches, though, by putting all 2+ kombucha mothers into the one jar. I tasted the newest batch, and it definitely seems more alcoholic. The previous batch even carbonated a little! I really want to get a huge jar so I can do the large batches again, but for now I'm too stubborn to pay $26 for an empty 5-gallon glass jar at the local hardware store.

The weekly log, v. 1: Tuesday

Lots of people that I talk to about the farm pose the question, "What exactly do you do there?" And since it's been so long since I've posted, I thought I'd challenge myself by doing one post for each day this week. Here goes!

Tuesday
The first day of the work week started really light for me. I spent Sunday night and Monday in the city, thanks to Z and Soo. I surprised myself by dancing from around 9 on Sunday night to around 4 on Monday morning. I can still do it despite my early bedtime! Thanks to Z for picking me up Sunday, and for the dances we had (more next time, please!). Monday I got to spend some quality time with Soo. I rode around with her while she worked, helped her pick out and move some bookshelves into her soon-to-be new digs, and we saw the movie Up. It was pretty sweet, but I wasn't in love with it like I expected to be. Nick Olinger drove me back to the farm last night, and we got in so late that he spent a night in the barn! There's a spare room now since Lil' Zach left (BIG *sniffle*), so Nick slept in there. This morning I made blueberry-zucchini pancakes and sent him on his way before I had some morning yoga/reading time. It was absolutely wonderful. Good to get off the farm, dance, and see other friends again.

I got this morning off because Zach & Georgia had a home inspection. They just bought a farm & house a little bit south of here (not sure where exactly), so I started work today at 1:00 in the greenhouse, processing onions. We have the onions all laid out on pallets to cure. Basically this means they're drying so that we can process them without having them rot. We take the whole onion, cut the green top and the roots, and then quickly rustle off any loose outer skin. So I did this to four pallets of beautiful red torpedo onions. I really enjoy their spicy, fiery flavor. After clearing out four pallets we had room to finish laying out the rest of the torpedoes and the yellow copra onions. Zach came just as I was sunscreening myself, and we loaded the onions and the compost into his truck.

With 6 crates of onions processed, it was time for me to go and help Dan & Kathleen with the Swiss chard harvest. Though all our markets are on the weekend, we harvest on Tuesday because we supply Potomac Vegetable Farms' CSA with vegetables on Wednesday. So we had to get 150 bunches of chard this afternoon. It was definitely spotty. The first two patches we picked were small and bug eaten, so there was more tending and less harvesting than usual. But by the third row, the chard was looking super nice, dark green, and there were even some large leaves. Daniel went to pick tomatoes with Katherine when we reached 100 bunches, and then Kathleen and I finished the last 50. Afterwards we washed them and made sure we counted correctly (we were 2 short, so I biked out to the field and grabbed 2 more bunches), then put them downstairs in the walk-in cooler. Zach pulled in about this time and we helped him unload all the onions and stack them on pallets. Did I mention my arms are stronger? Crates of onions are heavy, and today - for the first time - I was able to carry 2 crates of onions at once. Boosh!

We finished around 6:45. Kathleen & I closed the deer fences. Katherine stopped to offer me tomato seconds on her way to deliver them to the basement. When you work on a farm, you eat lots of vegetables, and they're nearly always seconds: the ones that aren't pretty enough for market, or have cuts in them, or a bug hole, or are slightly rotten. Sometimes, especially with tomatoes, they're perfectly fine quality, but they just look too gnarly. So I stuffed as many as I could into my backpack, along with the red torpedo seconds, and a bunch of chard, and went along my merry way after I checked out the berry bushes. It looks like the black raspberries are done, the wineberries are winding down, and the blackberries are just coming in. Tasty.

Ah, dinner. There's a potluck every Tuesday night at one of the neighboring farms, and tonight's was at Moutoux Orchard next door. I made a smoky fava bean hummus, and there was also roasted roots, beet & veggie soup, rice, and sausage & onions. Pretty tasty, but I cut out early because I was feeling really out of whack. And I decided to do this blog post, which has taken longer then expected. David and Penny just got back from the potluck bearing a crate of peaches and a pail of fresh eggs. EGGS! We haven't had farm eggs in at least a month, and we just got eggs! It's really really exciting for me since fish is expensive and I don't eat dairy or mammals. But for a farmer who sells eggs, it doesn't usually make sense to give other farm workers a deal on them because at market, people will pay $6/dozen for farm fresh eggs. ??!@*!#**?@! Clearly I don't understand, but I am very grateful to Rob Moutoux for the eggs. And I will tell him the next time I see him.

Tomorrow comes bright and early at 6:00 a.m. Zach went tonight to get 6,000 or 7,000 of the next round of plants for the autumn, which are brassicas: broccoli, savoy cabbage, brussel sprouts, collard greens, kale. Six or seven thousand. And that's what we'll be doing tomorrow, along with harvesting the last of the onions and some potatoes. I really like planting things! It has to be done fast, and it's super intense, and then you look up, and you've all planted an entire block of crops just like that. And that's why I'm going to bed right now.