I showed up for work this morning at the normal time of 7AM (well, maybe more like 7:04AM). I was having a rough morning because I hadn't gotten much sleep last night. There are new tenants in the adjacent apartment and they threw a big party last night. I normally wouldn't mind this - after-all, today was labor day - but, I, unlike the rest of the country (and Canadians, too, apparently) had to get up at 6:15AM and was therefore in bed by roughly 10PM. I'm actually on track to over-explain the problem.
Here, let me simplify. 1) my neighbors were loud 2) their loudness kept me up last night 3) I was groggy and bitter going to work this morning. There!
The good news, however, is that when I showed up to work, Julie, the farm owner, came creeping over to the "office" (a small room in a barn where all the workers meet in the morning) to tell us that she was giving us the afternoon off. This was a welcome surprise. Julie's never given us off before, or let us go early for any reason. I'm not angry about that. In fact, it's exactly the way things should work on a farm. As I said to Mary while we were harvesting beans this morning: "Weeds don't stop growing for national holidays."
It's true, they don't. Nor do they stop growing on weekends when most of the farm workers get off (this is just on our farm, on most other farms, the workers usually only get Sunday off). In fact, if anything, they seem to grow more vigorously in our absence. Not that weeding is the only task with which farmers are concerned - there's always something to be done on the farm... always.
Anywho. So we prepared a couple beds for planting this morning and then harvested the summer squash and our different varieties of green beans. Oh, I should probably explain what a bed is. You know when you look at pictures of smaller farms (or if you've ever been around a farm visiting or whatever) you see the long rows that are a few feet wide (often 3 to 5 feet) and, oh, who knows, a hundred or more feet long? Those are beds. Between the beds are walkways where we, the farmers, can move about without trampling the crops with our big, clumsy, be-booted feet (the walkways are usually the same width as the tractor which has tilled the field, and are, in fact, really just the tire tracks in the soil).
The other thing I want to define is what a "row" is. In each bed, we plant a line of seeds, or seedlings lengthwise from one end to the other. This is a row. Most times we plant several rows of plants in a bed (say, 3 for instance). For example, the rows of beans I picked today were planted on the outsides of a bed for easy picking. In the inner region we planted summer squash.
I didn't expect to be writing about the farm so much. All I really wanted to do here was get out my experiences of the day. Here goes the summary: I went to work, harvested some vegetables and then at a yummy lunch which was prepared for us workers by Julie, the farm owner. She made us some kind of beet salad and some goat cheese and garlic spread. So delicious.
After I stuffing my face with that stuff, I drove over to David and Mary Jean's place and made Mary Jean some salsa using fresh tomatoes from the farm. Dear god it was good. No garlic this time though (to where my garlic head has escaped, I know not).
We munched and talked for a while and then I drove home along Canal road which runs by the C&O Canal down by the Potomac river. I was feeling a little down, and also annoyed... down because I knew that there were Labor Day parties happening around town but I knew of none and had been invited to none... and annoyed because the national park which parallels the river was full of people intent on grilling cow flesh, drinking beer, and getting their nature fix for the year. I don't really mind that they were doing these things - I just wanted to go for a quiet walk to round out the afternoon and was denied access to my sanctuary by a bunch of drunken, SUV driving, Nascar fans.
/bitter moment.
I drove on home, took a nap, woke up, cleaned the house, made some dinner and sat down to write a blog entry for once. So, this is it for now. For anyone who is reading this, please forgive me if I'm boring or hard to read. I haven't written regularly ever, and especially not since last semester. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up and get my writing skills back in order.
