phewwwww, I fell down on this thread! so much for stages of it all this year! perhaps next! of course at this point everything is well into the season and booming nicely. Less rain than last year but I've only had to manually water once.
I've been spending a good amount of time working fields and gardens both my own and at a volunteer position (they pay us in food! nothing better, really!) at an organic farm near Lancaster, PA. They use a drip irrigation system, so are not reliant on rain.
Weeding weeding weeding, more weeding. Harvesting harvesting more harvesting. Processing processing processing, and some more processing.
I've also been solely responsible for keeping the tomatoes in one of the hoop-houses trimmed (a small kind of green-house, but still a good few hundred sq. ft. of rows of tomatoes, a pretty big task.)
Noteworthy weeding:
The potato fields were neglected and overgrown with tall grass and giant weeds above my waist, it was a huge exhausting job to do (notably sore for days, and I'm not that out of shape.)
At the farm we're working, we don't harvest.
"Processing" means a variety of things, most generally preparing for storage or immediate consumption.
Pickling cucumbers and beats (nomnomnomnom!!!! two of my favorite things ever, really.) My partner has made some gold-beat burgers and frozen them, too. Then there's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of cutting and freezing of tomatoes, okra (we're not at our halfway point yet and have 15 gallons of tomatoes frozen and 4 gallons of okra frozen), lesser quantities of broccoli, green beans, strawberries, wineberries, black-raspberries.
There've been salads and stir-frys and fried squash aplenty! The farm also has chickens and so we get free eggs from them every week (anywhere from 4-10. The chickens of course just live happy lives out in the fields, eating bugs and chillin as they wish. A fox has snatched a couple. Quite sad.) We put eggs in stir-frys and is the coating to bread and fry squash with. I generally dislike squash and never eat it, but discovered last year that breading and frying and it is yummmmy.
Oh, it is also a cattle farm, but, we do nothing with the cattle. Except sing to and flirt with them sometimes, and feel sad a bit when we see some separated to go off to be butchered, but they lead great lives, and is really great to see and be close to (I strongly believe most people in the US are too far removed from their food.)
Hmmm, anything else noteworthy? Pests have been generally agreeable. No deer issues for our garden, just a couple bunnies, who while we regularly chase away, don't really mind sharing with because they eat so little, worst thing they do is chew tops off of pepper plants, but they stay away from doing that if they can and go for other stuff (I figure they only do it as a mistake!)
Oh, and, a woman runs the farm (except the cattle), she's really cool and it's a really chill place to work. They let us make our own hours most of the time (recently 1 day a week has switched to "we need you here at this time this day to help process vegetables for the farmer's market on saturday") - which with how hot it has been, has been a saving grace (doing heavy weeding or any work inside a hoop-house is brutal anywhere from about 10am-5pm, so we have done some pre-5am starts and post-5pm starts, and it's been very nice.)
There is an organic grocery store on the farm run by the daughter of the guy who owns the land (he lives on the farm, but is too old to run it any more, he's a cool old guy) where they sell the farm's goods (chickens, beef, veggies, fruit, and then have a small stock of other stuff generally found in organic grocery stores.)
Her husband also works around the farm and he's in a local pretty well-known folk band and a good fellow.
There are also lots of cats and a few kittens that roam around (the cats kind of have their own territories around the farm, but do move around too, depending where the ppls are at at times.) I love cats, and they are outdoor farm cats all with distinct personalities and I have relationships with a few of them. This also means there's always some dead bird pieces around, and mice, but they usually eat the majority of their kills.
The kittens have stolen our hearts as kittens always do if I let them. Yesterday after we were done with our shift, we could see a large storm rolling in (a fast roll, too, it was awesome, as storms can be) and stayed with a couple of the kittens on the porch of the farm-house and watched it and waited for it to pass.
Post edited August 13, 2016 by drealmer7
