First day

Today was my third day on the farm, and the first time that I've had enough time or energy to write a post.  For any of you out there who may have been worried, I am very much still alive, just a little pooped from long, hard days of manual labor.  Here is an account of my first day:

My first day on the farm started almost like a day at the office--walk the dog, take a shower, make breakfast, feed the dog, eat breakfast in the car...but that's about when the similarities stopped. Instead of driving to the light rail station, I headed to the farm. I was greeted by a cold wind and the smiling faces of the farm staff and my co-apprentices.  After brief intros, we headed out to the field for a harvest.  We had a very small order to fill--just 5 boxes for our own use this week.  We started with lettuce, since it is delicate and gets limp as the day goes on.  Who knew that there is a special knife just for harvesting lettuce?!  Next came collard greens, kale, cabbage, broccoli, rutabagas, and carrots.  Carrots were my favorite to harvest--you stick your pitch fork in the ground near the carrots and pry up several at a time--it's like digging for buried treasure!  We bunched the crops in the field, tying them together with metal twist ties, then carried them to the packing shed to be rinsed and packed into boxes, then stored in the walk-in cooler until needed.  (I took a box home at the end of the day, and could barely find room in the fridge for all the goodies.  Alison made a salad from the lettuce for dinner and it was amazing--fresh, crisp, and quite tasty!)

The best part of the first day was definitely lunch!  In previous years, the apprentices have taken turns cooking for the farm team, so I arrived fully expecting (and dreading) cooking duty.  But much to my delight, this year, our meals are being cooked by a rotating team of volunteers!  Lunch on day 1 was a huge spread--Italian soup, fried cabbage, kale, quinoa, sausage, and lemon tahini cookies.  After spending the morning in the field being whipped by a cold, gusty wind, to come inside to a hot lunch was quite a treat.  Many thanks to the volunteers--you rock!

After lunch came an orientation to the overall apprenticeship, with a few surprises, most of them good.

• Good surprises: I get 5 days of vacation between now and the end of October (I didn't expect any); the apprenticeship is broken up into 2-4 week rotations so we get more in-depth exposure and ownership over various parts of the farm (feels like residency, in a good way); work days end at 5 pm (rather than when the work is done (on a farm, the work is never done)

• Bad surprise: When I was told that my hours would be five days a week with one weekend a month, I assumed those five days would be Monday through Friday.  Well, you know what they say about assuming... It turns out that our standard week is Tuesday through Saturday, since there is a lot of farm stand and volunteer activity on Saturdays.  So my weekends will be Sunday and Monday.  This has its benefits (I can schedule that dentist appointment for a Monday so I don't have to use my precious two days of sick leave), but since Alison's weekends are usually Saturday and Sunday, me working Saturdays will cut into our time together. :(



We ended the first day by finishing installation of the irrigation system in the newly planted orchard, burying the base of the sprinkler risers under a few inches of topsoil to keep the risers vertical (I dubbed this activity "planting pipe" to make it sound more farmer-like), then gluing sprinkler heads on each riser.  The filling was hard work, but the satisfaction of turning on the water to the orchard for the first time ever made it all worth it!

Planting pipe