Week One Recap: Bees, Garlic, and Weeding!

7:20 AM At The Office

Yesterday I completed my first official week at the farm! I've already racked up just under 40 hours in the past 4 days. It has been a physically demanding, hot, dirty, but ultimately very rewarding time. Each day typically alternates between harvesting for CSA customers, bulk wholesale orders, and Farmers' Markets and the subsequent washing, weighing, and packaging for said avenues of sale. In between harvest and wash, we are weeding, transplanting new veggies, weeding, laying irrigation lines, weeding, weeding, and watering the field via a convoluted (though very effective) irrigation system with its own annoying personality. 

 

This week we harvested a multitude of salad greens, Arugula, Leeks, Swiss Chard, Spinach, Cress, Green Garlic, and enough Red German Garlic to kill a Red German Garlic-eating horse.

  

Fun things from the week:

• Saw a swarm of bees first flying past the field (think cartoon bee swarm) and later swarming in an Oak tree. I had my hands in a tub of salad mix and nowhere near a phone, but it looked exactly like this pic:

•  Watched a cat go from lazy sleep to pouncing on a field mouse in the blink of an eye. (The dog saw the cat, pounced on the cat, and the mouse ultimately got away.)
• Lost my $30 fancy-shmancy camping utility knife in the field yesterday :-(
• Learned how to lay, hook-up, and splice lay-flat irrigating line
• Got to intimately know the Dutch version of the American weeding hoe, known as a Hula-Ho... seriously, that's its name. Looks like this. It scrapes under the weeds and feels like the outdoor equivalent of scrubbing the floor.

• "Limpiar los montes" means weeding in Spanish, but literally translates to "cleaning the weeds"
• Someone almost touched a snake in the field... Rat Snake maybe. It left.