Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Scribbles and Scrambles ~ Soggy Farm



The farm.

At noon we met up, grabbed lunch, put our grubby clothes on. (Except my sweet new pink gloves... I had to take a picture because they won't ever look like this again.) The plan was to leave at 12:30. The skies opened up at about 12:45. When I say opened up, I mean OPENED up. Lightning, thunder, buckets of rain. (The picture didn't quite capture said torrents.)

We arrived, thinking, that possibly the women would be hiding in an outbuilding, or waiting in cars. No. The ladies were ankle deep in mud, out in the field wrestling with two by fours, building a dam.

We jumped out, sloshed into the field and began working. The greenhouse had a small river running through it. We harvested lettuce once the lightning died down though the warning about not touching metal was restated. The squatting and duck waking was made more challenging because of the greasy black river and the extra ducking to avoid the metal shelving.

Today's harvest and packaging took only five hours. Impressive. The team seems to have their stuff down. Even though the spinach needed an extra wash....aphids... ants' little herds of cattle, and someone accidentally put some spinach in the lettuce wash bin and the spinach had to be painstakingly picked out. And, there was the forgotten radishes in two boxes incident. Counting is not my strength, and there were 23 boxes.

Another successful day, another harvest of goodies in the fridge, and another night wherein I slept like a baby.