…when a CSA member shows up with 4 loaves of banana and carrot bread.
….when your boss shows up with a case of doughnuts.
….when another CSA share member writes the crew the best thank you note in the world and sends along a box of cookies with it.
….when even another share member, on Wednesday night, comes in and helps us pack 420 CSA boxes at 6pm when we’re all deadpan and brings pizza.
Farming is where it’s at this week
:D
If you are thinking of jumping on the canning bandwagon, or already are on it and need a supplier for tomatoes and salsa ingredients, you can get them at the farm I’m working for this season! We are harvesting over 4000# of tomatoes a week and our boss has opened up Canning and Salsa shares to help us get these beauts to people who’ll eat them (instead of pigs and cows).
20# of canning tomatoes for $30
20# roma tomatoes for $40
and a Salsa package for $45 (20# tomatoes, plus peppers, jalapenos, cilantro and onions!)
Everything is organic, grown in Minnesota, and I can guarantee I personally weeded, harvested, and otherwise gave lots of lovin’ to every single vegetable in your box.
Only for the rest of September!!
Transplanted over 10,000 brassicas on Friday. As we said at the end of the day, lookin’ back on the field, “That’s a shit ton of broccoli.”
First harvest of nice raddichio heads!
Meet my friend Paul. Paul is a very talented musician, a peaceful guy, and has a kind face. He also is going to take his guitar on a bike tour around the US this summer. He’ll play his guitar at the places he goes, and will be using minimal gasoline to get there!
Anti-oil company? Pro-music? Vote with your dollars for a non-oil fueled economy and for independent music.
I will be donating my paycheck from the longest day I farm this week— which, lately, has been about 12 hours.
Watch the video now!
Coming up to my first month on Ploughshare. I realized that my farming experience so far has been a lot like getting my nose pierced. I wanted my nose pierced so bad that it didn’t hurt at all, even though it was supposed to. I wanted to farm so bad all the aches and pains (thus far, I realize it’s still early, for you nay-sayers) don’t hurt as much, or maybe I just don’t mind them as much. It’s such a satisfying hurt. I wake up in the morning with muscles hurting in places I didn’t realizing COULD hurt; like my fingers. There are muscles in my fingers I don’t think I’ve ever used, but after 1 day of hand weeding, they are making themselves very known. My knuckles are swollen and cracking, the skin is so dry they won’t bend. Bones crack that have never cracked before.
My boss wondered out loud once day while we were transplanting together, what we really thought about farming before coming into it. I said I think I had a pretty good idea of the kind of hard work we would be doing, having spent the last 3 years around farmers, but really didn’t realize how repetitive some of the tasks would be. Seeding 50 flats of broccoli and lettuce takes a long time, and is pretty boring. Transplanting 1 plant at a time takes a long time. Moving flats from one greenhouse to the next and then probably back again the next week takes a long time and seems unnecessary before you understand the needs and wont of seedlings.
The tediousness is all worth it to me. I fashion myself something of a greenhouse maven around here, having spent a ridiculous amount of time potting on tomatoes (meaning taking baby tomatoes and putting them into bigger pots, essentially, before they’re ready for the real world). I am starting to get a better idea of the idiosyncrasies of the greenhouse- when it’s too hot, when to open the sides, how much and when to water. It really is a Mothership filled with growing, hungry children. But I’m obviously not a master after just a month, I’m still learning why certain plants get too leggy on the shady side, how to spot rot (my fears of over watering are true!).
Weeding is a whole other game. You’d think the need to weed just stops at some point. But it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. I understand why we weed: weeds steal nutrients from the vegetable plant, so they’ve gotta come out or the veggies suffer. And there are countless ways to weed: wheelhoe, hand hoe, Reigi weeding, tine weeding, cultivating, hand weeding, flaming. But with all those tools, and all the weeds destroyed, they keep coming back! We spend more time weeding than anything else, probably, and it is a constant battle. I just feel like by now we should have conquered weeds- not with chemicals, just in general. And it is so repetitive to have to spend hours on your hands and knees pulling up threads of root. My hands ACHE from hand weeding. But we will continue to weed and weed and weed.
We got some thunder and lightening storms last night. A cool thing I learned about lightening- it puts nitrogen back into the soil, and is really good for plants. Also, typically 1” of water a week is good for most plants. And when seeding, cover the seed with dirt 2 and a half times the size of the seed. Cat poop is toxic to pregnant women, so the barn cat can’t be in the greenhouse anymore, and our arugula is going nuts! So nuts, in fact, the first CSA drop might be moved up a week from it’s already early 31 May date, to NEXT THURSDAY.
It’s a whole other movie out here.
Up close and personal: hand thinning parsnips. No weeding because they were flamed a while ago!
Each day I say I’m going to sit down and write, and by 8pm each night, I have stopped thinking and can no longer cohesively piece together all the little gems I was constructing throughout my day.
Although I am proud to say I wrote that whole paragraph without any spelling mistakes :)
Day 3 on Ploughshare Farm is over. By 8pm I really just want a glass of milk (which is WEIRD for me), or a caramel, and unfailingly a beer, also weird.
My story is not unique and I’m not interested in trying to make you interested in it. I’m another girl who left life in New York City for the quiet and dirty life in the country, who got tired of the noise and crowds and changed it for long days in the field and hands ruined by dirt (seriously, it’s only day 3 and my hands are done for). That’s the gist of it. If you want details, you can read “Dirty Life” by Kristen Kimball or “Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer” by Tim Stark. Their stories are mine, and mine also theirs.
So I find myself on a farm in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, about 3 hours northwest from Minneapolis/St. Paul, and 1300 miles from NYC. This is the first farm I applied to, the first I heard back from, and the first I visited, and it has just worked out that way. Gary, proud owner and our commander in chief, a man with an unnervingly Minnesotan accent, just so you get an understanding, says everything is about a week early. There are 2 beds of arugula in Center Field that are coming along significantly and that is worrisome. Now we have to starve them, basically, or we will have too much, too early.
The days are long, but it’s 8:30 and we’ve been done for an hour and Gary is still out there doing something. There is a frost advisory tonight, Spring is not yet guaranteed. And the days are only going to get longer as more and more move from the Mothership (main greenhouse) to the Halfway House (Hardening off house, to get plants ready for the real world), to one of many fields.
So just for an example, today, this was our To Do List:
Doesn’t seem like a lot, but consider each bed is roughly 300 feet, and there are somewhere between 4 and 6 beds of each…
Some can be done on the cultivator, which you sit in a sweet chair riding inches above the ground behind giant spiked wheels punching holes filled with fish/bone meal/molass water. Some things, like the leeks, have to be done by hand, and I’ll say tomorrow is going to be a hard start— 5 more beds of leeks to hand transplant, and if you didn’t know this, leeks are planted by each individual hair thin thread, 6 inches apart. Someone do the math for me, but that’s a shit ton of leeks.
I’ve been thinking about this farming work for so long, and knowing that I’ll love, or thinking that I know I’ll love it, and it’s so gratifying to be here, on day 3, and have not hated a single moment. It’s like when I got my nose pierced. I wanted it so bad that the parts that should’ve hurt didn’t.
I learned how to set up irrigation in the fields, and if I though Cayuga’s ratchette strap situation was bad, I was 150% wrong compared to the state of the rachettes in Ploughshare’s barn. I placed a dozen 40 foot long irrigation pipes and learned that the caps on irrigation pieces are called Male and Female parts… really. Because one is wider and one goes into that wider one… It’s hard not to make those jokes throughout the day…
Yesterday I learned that the barn cat, Skunk, a stunted vicious affectionate killer, shouldn’t be in the greenhouse anymore because apparently cat poop is toxic to pregnant women. All of these things!!!!!!!!!!!! What else can I say? I’m so happy to be replacing the space in my head reserved for anger at my noisy landlord with information like this.
Leaving New York was hard. I left a lot there, material and emotional. I couldn’t bring my boyfriend bag, but I could bring my cat, and I’m so glad I didn’t throw in the towel at his antics back in Brooklyn because he is a CHANGED MAN. Also fatter. Some things I thought I had shaken off have followed me here, but they are at a distance, and not nearly as high priority as the peas and leeks that need planting tomorrow.
The sunset is beautiful. And there are ticks
Here’s the farm I’m going to work on for the season. I leave tomorrow; SO EXCITED!
