Today begins week two of my 6a.m writing mornings. As the title implies, I have been getting up at 6, an hour and a half before work, so I can enjoy some solitude over breakfast and write. The moment when my alarm clock rings is pretty much the worst part of my day, but by the time I am walking over to the main house in the pre-pre-light of the fall morning I am in love, and having a whole hour in which I don’t have to interact with anyone is lovely. I like starting the day on my own terms, in the most productive way possible. The only problem with getting up before the sun is that my body, knowing that I will expect it to awaken without the cue of light, decides to wake up at many times that are not six o’clock and kick the thinking gears into motion, just to be on the safe side. In the case of last night, 1:30, 3:00, and 5:00. So I am a wee bit tired. But my days are exponentially better when I can start them in this way, so I keep going.
With these productive mornings I have finished a writing project I have been working on for some time, and in searching for a new project to get me out of bed in the morning I have decided to dust off my blog and give you a detailed update of my summer, and post it in chunks as I finish it. So here you go, a week of early morning updates.
First, since they are currently preoccupying the pain centers of my brain, I would like to share with you the state of my hands. Between the apple tree branches, blackberry thorns, and those cardboard boxes I was folding yesterday, I have some rather lacerated appendages. Yesterday was a particularly bad day. First thing I did was move a small wooden table in the packing shed and catch my finger on a nail, cleanly removing a quarter inch circle of skin. I’m sure that bit of skin was unnecessary to my life, but it hurt regardless. Then I made boxes and gave myself several cardboard paper cuts, one really good one on my index finger that is exactly where my spoon wants to rest right now as I’m eating my morning oatmeal. I am prone to small infections; part of my healing process for cuts seems to be getting red and inflamed and hurting like it’s the big thing to do. I count at least nine such semi-infected cuts at the moment. So, that’s fun.
Anyway, now that that important update is out of the way, I will now guide you through my summer.
The first few weeks were filled with a variety of jobs. The farmers are constructing a ten-foot woven wire deer fence all around the farm which is quite an undertaking with the steep hills and rocky soil. But I would know little of these trials, as my contribution mostly consisted of hauling several cords of wood out of the way and standing around holding the fence up while they stapled it to the posts. Other early season jobs included planting strawberries, apple trees in the nursery and in the field, and various vegetables for our own use and for sale. I did a lot of pruning and training in the vineyard and nursery, and discovered that I love pruning things. It is so satisfying to coax the plants into order, and they always look happier once you have chopped off all those unnecessary limbs. Of course, in the case of grape vines, you have to do it all again a week later when they grow several feet over a couple days.
In June, in the midst of the first really hot days, I started working on a job that I found to be the most interesting and fulfilling work of my summer: building pasture fences for grazing pigs. The farmer taught my coworker Nick the basics of working with high tensile wire fencing and set him loose on the project. When he needed a hand, they sent me out to help. It was very much a ‘ask questions if you must but really just use your common sense’ kind of project, and I learned so much about the physics of H-braces, fence line placement, and how to work with very heavy wire—the trick is to accept its quirks and not try and make it do anything it doesn’t want to do. I returned to this project many times over the season, and every day I worked on the fence was one of my best days. I would now have the confidence to go out and build a pasture fence on my own, and that is worth a lot to me.
On the first of June we harvested the first the strawberries, and on June 20th we were in full swing, harvesting all day. Strawberries were the worst crop on my body. All that shuffling around on my knees for eight hours a day made me feel old, like I was at least thirty or something. But then there was the fact that I got to eat strawberries while I picked them. Now, I have always liked strawberries, but I was never that crazy about them. I would get excited to go pick them with my mom, and then after a few days of making jam and eating shortcake I was quite done with them. But this season, even through a month of heavy picking, I never got tired of them, and I continue to mourn their absence.
I think part of it was the unpredictable reinforcement they provided. I would just be picking along, eating strawberries like it was as much a part of my job as picking them, minding my own business, when boom! I would eat one that just made life worth living, one that would explode down to my very toes with flavor and juiciness that explained the existence of taste buds. Such an experience is what the word “foodgasm” was coined to describe. If you have never had a sun-warmed organic strawberry straight from the field, I suggest you drop everything next spring and seek out a field of them.
One thing that bothered me about strawberries, and that has carried through the season with every other crop, is the amount of plastic that is used to package them so they can be sent to the grocery stores. Even when sold locally, fruit still requires a huge amount of plastic to keep it looking good, fresh, and acceptable to the stores and the customers. And there are not a lot of viable alternatives in a food system where farms are located at a distance from population centers. This is one reason for my growing interest in urban agriculture, but more on that later.
In the beginning of July I got to spend two days working on another interesting project: replacing the roof on the house. I had never done any roofing before but I am always up for learning new skills so I expressed interested and was sent up the ladder. There is a peculiar mindset on this farm, one that is I believe common on farms but always takes me by surprise, that if you know how to do something, great, but if you don’t, go do it anyway. Of my two coworkers up on the roof, Jake had worked for a roofer before and Nick knew “just enough to get himself in trouble,” and for the second day of roofing Jake was gone so it was the two of us, the one who knew just enough and the one who knew nothing, and that was perfectly okay, why would we need an expert? We both successfully followed the most important rule Jake gave us, ‘Don’t Fall Off The Roof’ and muddled through the rest with sufficient skill. As with the fencing, this job sticks with me as being one of the most educational and the most fun jobs of the season, a good reminder that I don’t know everything, but that I don’t have to know everything to do good work.
About the same time we started harvesting raspberries. This is also about the time that my work journal keeping peters out, for reasons that should become obvious.
I hate raspberries with a fiery burning inflamed passion and I hope to never pick them for work again. Is that enough information to be going on?
At least the work of picking can be done standing up. That was the only positive. One of my coworkers described harvesting raspberries as “being chained to a slow-motion conveyor belt” and said he would give up a month’s pay if he didn’t have to pick any more. It didn’t help that in the peak of the season the heat index was routinely well over a hundred degrees, so that all the scratches on our arms burned and stung with every drop of sweat. I got heat exhaustion one day and had to go lie down under a tree while I tried not to throw up. And the gnats were awful, getting in our mouths, noses, eyes, and buzzing deep into our ears. One of the most unpleasant sounds in life, I have discovered, is the sound of a bug flying into your ear when it is not immediately followed by the sound of it flying out of your ear.
And on top of all of this raspberries don’t even taste that good. Let’s just stop talking about them.
Coming soon: Sweat-infused blueberries, apricots, plums, and whatever else I manage to remember.
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