Just a Taste

Harvest, like always. Serious harvest. Bridget and I alone picked six lugs of saladettes mainly indigo rose/Cherokee purple. Massive trays of Striped Germans. Everyone else joined us in picking the cherry tomatoes, and tomatillos. Some volunteers and Fred picked the corn whilst I picked watermelons. When I looked over because Fred was yelling about something or other to Meg, I saw him munching on an ear. This influenced my decision to peel off during some of the work where I would not be missed, and have one myself - I was hungry after all. It took me a while to find an ear that was big enough that I would be satisfied, the large ones had just been picked. When I did find it, there were worms in it, as there have been in many of them. I ate it anyway, the lower half was almost pristine.


Meg and Abby a volunteer, got to talking. The truth is I don't say much at the farm. At one point Abby asked me when my last day was, I quippingly said "Wednesday.", and walked away. That was it, still in a sore mood about the thought of no pay, which only amounted to gas money. I am serious too, I plan on quitting after tomorrow.

Alone on a Hill

At the end of last week I decided to start coming out to the farm three days a week, I told Meg then Kristen. This morning Kristen wanted to talk to me about the decision. She wanted to tell me that the $10 a day stipend I was being given was for full-time work and because I have the opportunity to make money elsewhere, that I would no longer be getting paid. My first reaction was okay I guess, I just stood at the sink filling my jug, then I walked out saying nothing just nodding my head. I then headed over to the heritage garden where I stood there, with this event rolling through my head. Kristen said something along the lines of tell me how you feel about this, and that she would still pay me the ten for today because she didn't tell me last week, and here I was. Fred standing in the vicinity during the chat, piping in "If you were here for the money you must be pretty hard up."

 

What am I here for? This measly amount of pay bothers me more than anything, it is so little already. My time is worth nothing it seems. So I did little to no work on the heritage garden just walked around avoiding people. I found that the dill I was waiting on to go to seed had been mown down. I did manage to find some seeds but less than I hoped for. I found the Custom at the top of the hill but no one was around it. Strange. From the hill top you can also see across the road to the greenhouse and I could see Meg was in there working. I moseyed on back. All day I thought about what reaction would be best that might even get my pay back. I can't see a scenario where I am happy staying here anymore, the end of the season is about two months off. How could I stay till then? If I leave I am sure they will have little reaction, I doubt I would get a call begging me to return. I'm not respected here.

Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch

Pawpaws are North America's largest native fruit! The pawpaw, is making a come back due to new found interest and breeding operations. I love it because the deer don't like to eat its toxic leaves. What more could I ask for?

This small under story tree loves rich soil with lots of organic material. In it's first few years of life it is important that it does not get full sun. Over exposure stresses the tender leaves. Pawpaws are often found near river banks where they become a small thicket.

The flower of the pawpaw is reddish brown faces downward and smells of rotten meat. That may sound off-putting to your tender nostrils, but it does attract unlikely pollinators - flies.

Acetagenins found in the pawpaw are a known cancer fighting agent.

It's the host plant for zebra swallowtail butterflies.

There is an annual pawpaw festival in Ohio!

The first written record by De Soto in 1541 tells accounts the Native Americans cultivating it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson loved the fruit dearly.

One of the pawpaws planted at the edge of the forest behind the house.

Midnight Post

So much happens so fast that I can hardly keep track. Keeping up with this journal has been difficult. I have been either physically or mentally unable at the end of the day. I was using the computer to upload PASA talks from Fred's library, and at that time I should have been writing. I was most likely lying on my bed feeling heavy and comfortably deadened.

We started picking green tomatoes on the hilltop because late blight has arrived. Ripe tomatoes are soft and the greens ones, aside from my liking for their under ripe flesh, can be tossed around with less care they might bruise. I took to playing a few rounds of bocci with them. I could only get away with this because I was all by myself on this pick. One might think that more time would be spent alone on the farm but that is not always the case. I spend most daily projects with Bridget, the only other true live-intern, but at this time she is in the barn checking in CSA members. Usually this would be Meg's job, and a cushy one at that, sit at the barn while members trickle in. Today she has a friend in town from Canada I believe, Nova Scotia perhaps, and is leaving early to meet her downtown. I played Bridget in rock paper scissors to see who would take first shift. We have played RPS a few times now and I have yet to win, each time I throw paper and she throws scissors. My strategy is to continue to throw paper. The game might be slightly altered, in the farming spirit to corn/beans/squash CBS, the three sisters.

When I had picked four lugs of tomatoes I took the golf cart down the hill to take my shift at the barn. Chugged a cherry soda, because I felt that it was my obligation to take advantage of the situation. I would say all in all I checked off no more than 8 CSA members on this evening. I found it comical that I was covered in so much dirt and sitting at this banal post. The best part was that I found a book under the desk worth reading, "Stalking the good life" by Euell Gibbons

(awesome spider picture missing...)

There are some incredible spiders in the high tunnels. One that Bridget believes is a golden orb spider, and another with black and yellow markings, both of them with bodies as big as an inch long. The only other time I had ever seen a spider this large is when I almost ran into a Banana spider while on a nature walk in Florida. The high tunnels are not Pennsylvania, so to speak, they could be a jungle climate, except for the fact that there is a plastic dome over them, making it impossible for rain to enter in. Each layer of plastic separated by air is the equivalent of the climate fifty miles south, or was it one hundred and fifty. Either way these greenhouses are a poorly thought out design, except for their ease of construction. I swear I almost wrote ease of destruction. Here lies a desert of desolate dead soil under a polyurethane prison.

Tractor safety school came to the farm. The Ag safety crew from Penn State dropped by to give a lesson on the do's and don'ts of tractor operation. Dennis the main speaker of the day, was a friendly and well spoken presenter. The fact is tractors tip over killing hundreds of farmers each year, and a great numbers of injuries also occur. New regulations have improved safety, the inclusion of a ROP or roll over protection for instance, but it is up to the operator to check these systems. 

 

The power take off or PTO runs the many implements from a spline at the rear of the tractor which spins from power geared off the engine. The PTO can rotate anywhere from 9 to 24 times a second. The amount of horsepower is exponentially greater than your own, giving you no chance of getting free if caught. Getting yourself caught in the PTO is as dangerous as it gets. The horror story that Dennis spun was of being caught in the implement whirling around for over half an hour wrapped around it and living through the ordeal to be crippled and disfigured. Pretty picture. Tractors have many similarities to the automobile, but some differences that I thought might trip me up when it came to driving. The Ag guys set up a course of road cones, a little weave and reverse, swinging back to the beginning. It is important to push the clutch when stopping. The automatic car may have made a manual transmission all but obsolete, tractors only have one gear as it is.

Sew and Tell

Rolled in around nine, got strait over to the heritage garden. Stretched for a bit, tied up some tomatoes and pulled some thistle. My pant leg was ripped before I even put it on this morning, split up from the bottom of my right leg. The rip made the pants look like bell bottoms and was annoyingly flapping around especially when I walked. Because I had the tomato string and my pocket knife with a sewing awl I decided to sit down and fix this problem. I eventually worked out a good stitch where I pulled the loop of string all the way through then sent my knife attached to the end of the string through the loop and pulled it tight, this is how I imagine a sewing machine does it. So far the stitch is holding tight. 

I grabbed a shovel to aid Bridget in Fabio who was digging a ditch to fill with mulch for a pathway between the new beds that we had just hoed in. She was almost done with digging the ditch by the time I got there from my crocheting experiment. I helped her to finish this job meant for a chain gang. We then attached a trailer that was essentially a big wheel barrow to the back of the golf cart, taking it down to the mulch pile. Finally, I thought, mulching, now here's something that makes sense to me.

Weed beets till lunch. Why can't we have a more virulent beet? A beet that is the weed, "damn all these beets, I just can't pull them all." I guess the world is not ready for a steady stream of red.

Baby Evelyn has started crawling!

Magic Beans

This morning I put up a fence to keep the chickens out of the heritage seed garden. Made with orange plastic "caution" fence the kind with long squared off ovals. It only covers the front side but the chickens aren't keen to venture around the high-tunnels that way. They may still get in. As I am doing this the girls are in Fabio right next to me cutting in a new bed. Using hoes they are ripping the soil apart six to eight inches deep. Okay, the soil is already dead so who cares? I try and use a pitch fork to break up the sub layer without complete disturbance, where I have worked gets gone over with the hoes anyway. I'm not in the mood to defend my case about soil that is already dust bowl bound. It gets quite hot in under plastic quickly, and without water I'm suffering. Meg comes by with a Sicilian squash that is about four and a half feet long and curled up into a circle, it is slug over her shoulders like a championship title belt. She has also collected a jar full of tomato horn worms, and I mistake them for beans. It is startling when I see them move.

Speaking of beans we are headed out to harvest dry beans. These are not long bean pods that you eat, the seed inside is what we are after. The beans them selves are pink in the dragon tongue variety, and others are black and white that were called Calypso in the seed catalog which look like Orca whales to me, some others that are magenta colored but might be mistaken for a regularly red bean although I don't think they are as typical. Down the rows we go, filling a lug to the brim with them. Selective breeding and color theory give us beans of plenty.

Lunch is interrupted by Fred asking us to unload some hay and straw from a large trailer that has arrived to fill an order that Kristen has made. We all go out and pull down the many bails of straw out in the field waiting for Fred to bring us pallets, he watches from a far. The straw will be used to mulch some rows. Then the truck backs up to the cow barn to unload the hay. Hay is for horses. We all jump on the back, my first hayride on the farm, perhaps the last. There are some pallets but not enough for all the hay, many bails end up stacked outside. The bails are not too heavy but I am working up a good sweat trying to keep up with Meg who decides to carry two off the trailer each trip.

Cow on the Lamb

I started out watering in the high-tunnels. I was under the impression that we had managed to plant most of the seedlings as Fabio, the interim hardening off house, has become empty. Somehow trays full of new seedling have sprouted in the greenhouse, which I know eventually will need planted out. Last week after all the cucurbits, but one, were pulled out due to powdery mildew the beds were reseeded with salad greens.

Met up with the girls who were about finished harvesting corn for today's CSA, the ears looking big and good. Bridget and I picked 380 basil tops respectively. Well almost, Meg showed up near the end and snagged them so fast that I couldn't even pick half of what she did in the same time. I don't know her methods, she doesn't seem to go any faster, maybe she slows down time. I got stung on the thumb by I don't know what. It hurt like hell for a few minutes then went away, never saw a stinger. I slapped chewed up plantain poultice on it. The bees love the basil; now going to flower.

Of course we were weeding beets for over an hour until lunch. Then we seeded some more winter crops directly into the ground. Seems late but I wouldn't be surprised if they do alright. Lunch was leftover pork and kale from the CSA picnic. I believe that John made this dish. I was glad to have it; it tasted quite good.

After lunch we were back to weeding beets, nothing special here. Afterwards we were in the club car heading down to our next project when I spotted that Ella (the Jersey cow) had escaped from her temporary grazing pen. Bridget drove us over to find her harness. Of the farm things that have happened recently this takes the cake. Ella did not want to be caught. As Bridget tried to wrangle her I drove around and tried to cut her off or keep her from crashing through the corn field. Eventually Bridget left to find Meg and I had my shot at taming the beast. The ol' girl has moves which I was not expecting and weighing in a around 600 lbs. she really can be intimidating. I chased her for a long while until Meg appeared and snagged her in two tries. "Helps to know the animal, her limits, and how to handle her."

Bridget and I move "Reame" row covers over the brassica patch on hilltop 8, assuaged by Kristen that it would be an easy job. Rolling out long white cloth, carrying it down to the row, stretching it out and burring the ends takes a bit of time. It was not the worst project ever, and it got done without too much pain. The worst is when the row cover is all twisted up, we would have to go hand over hand to undo the rat tail. Afterwards I drove us out, we turned off the irrigation system that had been running since last night. I had thrown my fishing rod on the back of the golf cart so I stopped at the "cock dock" to cast a few lines. The dock, recently installed by Chris, was one strip of wooden planks kept afloat by two plastic barrels, a design that didn't take into account how it would appear.

My new rod, and this is the first time I have used it. It was snagged out of a dumpster at an Estate sale. It seems to be a good rod, and would bring in a much bigger fish than I should be able to catch in this pond. I was able to catch a few blue-gills that were caught by dragging my line as far out as the rod in front of me. I thew them back as all were too small to eat. Got a few good casts when I tied on a weight, but the line kept catching and stopping dead in mid air. Not in a mood to fix another rat's nest.

Walking up from the pond I find Fred and Sam in front of the wood fired oven, stoking it so that Fred can roast some coffee and make biochar. Sam is talkative and smells of alcohol, not sure how many he has had, but there are two growlers from this weekend's picnic in a cooler, one of "Hettle" mead, heather and stinging nettle honey wine, and one of a pear cider. I start drinking a hot hot hot ginger beer, it is quite good, the slightly warm finish to a long day.