Monday, May 28, 2012

Weeding, welding, and quilting?

That's right--all in a day work.  If you've been wondering why I haven't been blogging, I've been a bit busy on the farm and at home.  My activities lately are quite an interesting hodgepodge.  Last Thursday, I spent the morning weeding a bed of beets in the leaf-root block.  (I'm sure I did other things that morning, too, I just can't remember what.  Hand weeding is slow, but not that slow!) That was followed by an afternoon of welding class.  Until that afternoon, I had never welded a thing in my life, but given the amount of welded things in this world, I figured it couldn't be too hard.  I was wrong.  Just cutting metal proved challenging, let alone trying to join two pieces of metal together.  We learned three kinds of welding in our hands-on class: oxyacetylene, arc, and MIG.  The oxyacetylene setup consists of a tank of oxygen, a tank of acetylene, and a torch/wand. 
Oxyacetylene welding kit.
Getting started is a bit tricky and requires your brain to be engaged--the acetylene has to be turned on before the oxygen and its pressure kept below a certain psi or explosions can happen.  Once the acetylene gas is running, you ignite it using a sparker (chemistry lab flashbacks!), making sure to get your hand out of the way of the flame quickly!  Then you add oxygen slowly to make sure you don't extinguish the flame, adjusting the oxygen until you have a one inch or so cone of blue heat.  To cut metal, you hold the tip of the cone over the area to cut, heat it up until the metal begins to liquefy, and then use the flame to push the liquid metal along the cutting line.  Wild stuff.

Next came arc welding.  Arc welding is weird because it uses electricity instead of a flame to heat the metal. 
Our arc welder.
The challenge with arc welding is that you are practically working blind.  To protect your eyes from the intense light emitted, you have to wear a face shield with very tinted lenses. 

A fellow apprentice models welding safety attire, including face shield, leather coat, and gloves.
Until you touch the electrode to the surface to be welded and start conducting electricity, you can't see a thing.  Even when the electrons start flowing and the metal starts glowing, you can only see things that are really hot.  As if working half-blind weren't enough of a challenge, the stick of metal you are using to weld (the electrode) gets shorter as it melts.  So you have to lower your hands as you go to keep the tip of the electrode near the surface to be welded.  It reminds me a bit of tetherball in the sense that the rope gets shorter as it winds around the pole, and your arm swings have to compensate.  I was never good at tetherball, and I don't think I will be good at arc welding for a similar reason.  When I wasn't burning a hole in the metal to be welded, I did manage to create a very lumpy and uneven bead of weld.  I have a long ways to go before I can fix anything metal, that's for sure. 
My attempt at arc welding.  On the right is a hole I burned in the surface to be welded when it got too hot.  On the left is a lumpy, almost bead.

After welding class, I headed home to prepare for a night of quilting with my fellow apprentices.  One of the Green Corps teens had a baby recently, and we are making a baby quilt for him.  It's a teaching/learning quilt, with me demonstrating each step of the quilting process for my colleagues, then letting them have at it.  The "see one, do one, teach one" approach used in my medical training also works with quilting, I've learned.  At the end of the night, the quilt was in one piece, and now needs only to be ragged and laundered before it can be gifted.
Fabrics for the baby quilt.
The juxtaposition of welding and quilting seemed perfectly natural to me, but I imagine others must find it bizarre.  Sometimes I feel like a farmer, and sometimes I feel like a farmer's wife.  What can I say?  I'm just me.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Staying cool

It's hot. We may be blessed with dry heat here in California, but it's still heat. Gone are the days of sitting in my air conditioned office oblivious to the weather outside. Now, I am intimately aware of the weather because I spend all day in it.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice," begins the poem "Fire and Ice," by Robert Frost.  Given a choice, I'd take ice. My reasoning is that there you can always put on another layer, but there are only so many that you can take off (at least in public!). Surprisingly, however, our response on the farm to the heat is not to minimize clothing. Rather, most of us wear long sleeves and long pants to keep the hot sun off our skin, and a big hat for shade. For hydration, most of us wear Camelbaks, drinking water from a tube attached to a backpack reservoir, allowing continuous access to water and keeping our hands free for work.

My Camelbak, which holds 70 oz of water.

But given how much we sweat working in the field, just drinking water isn't enough. All that sweat means salt loss, and the lost salt needs to be replaced. My preferred electrolyte replacement beverage is Gatorade. Initially, I tried to carry a small bottle of Gatorade with me, but it always seemed to get left behind. I switched to a small jug with enough to share, which made my coworkers happy, too.

Drinking fluids helps, but it's not enough. I also want shade and a cool breeze. Since these can be hard to come by in the middle of a vegetable field during a Sacramento summer, I decided I'd have to make my own.  Alison and I spent a couple days of our vacation designing, buying parts for, and building a hydration and cooling station for the farm.  Using a large, two-wheeled Rubbermaid cart as the base, we added a plywood shelf with drilled cupholders, a spot for a 5-gallon jug of Gatorade, two battery-operated fans, and two pressurized personal mister bottles.  Inside the cart, there is space for two lawn chairs, a small cooler that holds wet washcloths and Otter Pops, and pretzels (for salt).  On the side of the cart, we mounted a 9-foot umbrella.  So far, the hydration station has been a big hit, with the misters being the most popular component.  With just a little bit of pumping and flipping open a valve, you get delivery of a cooling mist that feels AMAZING on a hot day.  I highly recommend these little gems to anyone who spends a fair amount of time outdoors in the heat.  It's almost as good as A/C!

Get one of these personal misters--they rock!


Building the hydration station
My coworkers demonstrating use of the hydration station

It sure is a lot of work to stay cool as a farmer.  Perhaps we should all do what the pigs do and just lounge in the pool instead!

Barley repurposing his water dish as a pool to beat the heat.




Friday, May 11, 2012

Road trip!

Aah, vacation.  I didn't need this vacation like I've needed vacation in the past, but I'd be lying if I said that having this past week off of work hasn't been a pleasure.  I get 5 days of vacation during my 8-month apprenticeship.  One could argue that using all 5 days during the third month of the program is perhaps not the smartest approach, but Alison had this week off, so it made sense to take our vacations at the same time.

We spent the first 3 days of vacation on the coast, which was a great escape from the heat of the Valley.  With overcast mornings and daytime highs in the 60's and 70's, the weather invited all kinds of outdoor activities and one last chance to wear a sweatshirt.  Cool spring weather is a favorite of Alison's, Dakota's, and mine.  Dakota loves being co-pilot on road trips, sitting in the front seat or sticking her head out the side window to watch and smell the world go by.  When she tires of standing and sitting, which happens pretty quickly on long trips, she sleeps.  My car (a Honda Fit) is the perfect car for a spoiled dog, with its magic seats that fold into several configurations, including one with the front seat opened flat.  Once padded with pillows, it makes a bed comfortable enough for our "princess and the pea" pup. 

Dakota, my 6-year-old lab, loves car trips
We stayed with Alison's brother just outside Pescadero, near Half Moon Bay, which meant we got to spend lots of quality time with Alison's 4-year-old niece, Natalie, and much of that time outdoors. Mornings on the beach, afternoon hikes in the redwoods, and strawberry picking were all on the list of activities.
Pistachio State Beach, a great dog beach
Alison, Natalie, and me rock climbing on the beach

The farmer part of me was particularly excited about picking organic strawberries at Swanton Berry Farm, petting the baby goats at Harley Goat Farm, and tasting local honey at a roadside stand. 
We picked organic strawberries at Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport


Our 1.54 pound strawberry harvest

Petting a friendly kid.  All the little ones tried to suckle my fingers.

Natalie kept trying to feed the baby goats straw.  I tried to explain the difference between hay and straw, but she didn't get it.  I myself just learned the difference last month.  In short, straw is bedding, hay is food.

An ingenious baby goat feeder.  I wish we had rigged up on of these instead of baby bottles for our piglets.  Way less bottle washing, and Bulgur wouldn't have to push his sisters out of the way to drink his fill.
Driving back from the coast was a brutal reintroduction to the heat of the Central Valley.  I fell asleep covered with a blanket in the Bay Area (in case you were worried, I wasn't driving), and woke up sweating somewhere inland.  How rude!  By the time we reached Sacramento's 90-degree heat, I was seriously considering turning around and heading right back to the coast.  I know the Valley's heat and sunshine make the crops grow, but I sure wish I could somehow work in a climate-controlled bubble while tending to those crops!