semana dos

Week two highlights:
1. getting licked all over by pigs
2. Flame weeding
3. Fires!

For week two, I figured I would describe our daily schedule a bit. We started the last two weeks at 6:45 am (tomorrow we switch to 6:15, when we start for the rest of the season). we do chores, which rotate weekly. this week I was on greenhouse duty, next week I'm on animals. Then we come in for breakfast. Bridget makes these amazing breakfasts. It's like having a sunday breakfast everyday. pancakes or oatmeal with applesauce and yogurt on top (and good yogurt - she makes it from the milk from Cricket Creek farm, just 2 miles up the road). At breakfast we have our daily meeting going over what work needs to happen today. on Mondays we also go for a 30 minute farm walk to talk about big jobs for the week. then we work until about 10:30, when we go in for a 15 minute break, and then head back out until lunch at 1. we start up at 2:30 and work til 6, with the last half hour or so also being chores. And we each have a day to cook lunch and dinner (I cook on fridays). you get an hour to cook. it feels like "Iron chef: on the farm". You try to use leftovers in creative ways like they are the secret ingredient. as we start to get more veggies on the farm i think it will be even more exciting. At the moment, there are still onions and carrots from last year, and then frozen berries, and lots of canned goodies to work with.

This week, we learned how to lay row cover. We fill about 50 bags with soil as weights, and then someone holds the roll at an end of the field as the other two walk it out, unrolling as they go. You can see our first covered row here.

We also learned how to flame weed. The idea behind flame weeding is that you take a blowtorch and pass quickly right over the bed after seeding but just before your plants germinate. The heat doesn't affect seeds (the layer of soil helps to insulate them) but it boils the water in the cell walls of plants that are already up (ideally, weeds). Although a couple of the spinach plants were up, less than 10% of them had germinated so I got to flame weed our 2 spinach beds. Hopefully, that means the spinach has a clean bed to start in and apprentices have a little less weeding to do down the line.



Tuesday, we lit fires all morning. I started with the raspberry canes on the river field. The canes got cut and then raked into a huge pile to help deter any spreading disease in the raspberry patch. Fire when through those fast! Then I worked on another fire by the creek. It was a pretty awesome morning...

Wednesday, we moved compost. All year, farm members are welcome to bring vegetable food wastes to the farm and they put it in a big bin by the distribution area. So we took apart the bin and pitched the compost into the tractor, and Melissa dumped it on the big compost pad lower down in the farm for it to finish. It was pretty smelly but the worms and the layers in the compost pile were amazing!





Saturday, we went to our first CRAFT event. CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Apprentice Farmer Training) is a cooperative program between farms to allow for greater networking and training opportunities for apprentices. We drove about an hour to Hawthorne Vally farm, and met about 35 other apprentices from over a dozen nearby farms. Pretty cool so far. This weekend, I was on "weekend duty", so I stuck around town, doing some errands, watching "Aparagus: a Stalkumentary" at the little independent theater downtown, and watered the greenhouse and took care of the animals. and this morning, I dumped pig feed all down my shirt. well, once I got into the pig pen the pigs were totally delighted to see me and nibbled off any feed they could find on my shoes, pants, arms, etc. Definitely makes the shower worthwhile :)