Davis

After two weeks, I finally made my debut back into civilization last night. Straight after work I jumped in the car to go visit some friends in Davis. Walking around with all the other kids, (that were all my age! gasp!) I felt like I was in a totally different world. With something to compare myself to, I noticed my personal hygiene levels have deteriorated somewhat...I guess dirty farm jeans don't really fly in the city.

Short and sweet

A short entry today. Mostly because I am delirious from having been awake for 17 hours (and counting). Also in part because of technical difficulties, my internet is acting up. Here are a few important observations from the day:
1)The market went really well, we sold out of a lot of things.
2) I unexpectedly got to explore the San Rafael Civic Center built by Frank Lloyd Wright. The layering on the inside gives you a tingly vertigo in your toes but it's worth climbing to the fourth floor to visit the library.
3) There is a new intern here named Rawley who is here with his girlfriend. He's a bit geeky and weird but he seems sweet. So far all I know about him is he lives in Oakland but he's from the East Coast and he used to teach 6th grade math in West Oakland.
4) He made a random comment about living in Connecticut and eating at Peppe's Pizza. So it made me think about Norway because that's the one big hot spot for eating out and all you get is mediocre but very expensive pizza.

Antonio

In my opinion, Antonio is the most special member of the crew. The first minute you meet him you can tell there’s something different about him, something in his way of being that is very unique. 

Antonio is an animal man. Any trouble with an animal and immediately Antonio is called over, any question about an animal and he is consulted. I remember back in October spending an unsuccessful hour wrestling and trying to coax our pigs out of some bushes. After much frustration, Antonio was called over and he quickly herded the pigs out in a matter of minutes.

Antonio smiles a lot but doesn’t speak much, he is shy and practical, patient. He has a kindness and understanding in his eyes and above all, a remarkable calmness.

Every day I chat with the workers and little by little find out details about their lives away from the farm. It feels like an excavation project, I’m slowly peeling away at the layers. I am beginning to figure out all the intricacies of their family problems, their journeys from Mexico, the lives they left behind. By now I suspect I know more than anybody else at Full Belly knows. I don’t think anyone else from the farm has ever talked to them in this way and I can see that my position is very unique. They like talking to me, for them I’m a bridge between two worlds that are very far apart. It’s strange possessing this knowledge all at once. I feel there is so much to learn from them, and so much left to understand.

Today as I was talking to Antonio I asked him how come he was so good at being with animals. Always modest without realizing it, he explained he had worked with animals for four years. But I knew that all his expert lasso-ing, milking, and sheep herding skills could not have come from just four years of work. After talking more he revealed that he had grown up in Guerrero, México, in Tierra Caliente on his grandparents’ dairy. On the farm they had pigs, chickens, sheep, and 1,200 cows for milking. His grandfather had been a big producer of cheese, making queso fresco and queso duro very effectively. When I asked him if he sold to a big company he said that he had successfully stayed strong doing his own business, selling at all the stores in the area and working very hard. This seemed like such a nice portrait of his life in Mexico but I knew that something was out of place because then why else was he here? We talked more and he eventually told me about his grandfather’s great misfortune:

Seeing that he was so successful, other people in the area became jealous and kidnapped his sons, vowing to kill them unless he gave them his cows and a big sum of money. Of course he gave them what they wanted and was suddenly left with nothing. When I heard this I'm positive I felt my heart shrink a few sizes, how could something so unjust happen to such a special person? I guess that might be part of what makes him so special. Somehow he was able to move on. But I still have a sore spot where that story rests.

Bright eyes

The most beautiful rain I’ve ever seen I witnessed this morning. Bent over pruning roses I began to hear the leaves around me crackling magically -- the rain was so thin you couldn’t see it or feel it through your clothes but it splashed noisily on all the trees and plants. I looked up for the first time in a while and before me was pure beauty. The sky was split in half -- one side dark with rain, the other a pure icy blue. Stretched across the entire thing, a fat rainbow connected both sides of the valley. Below the whole spectacle a sea of red plum trees with shiny ribbons blazed like a fire. Knowing that pictures can never do rainbows justice I ran to get my camera, rain falling on my face in gentle but precise droplets, little splashes of coolness on my skin.

P.S. Tonight is the first night I can see the stars! I can't get over how totally BRIGHT they are.

Off the hook

I guess it’s a vicious cycle because the more work there is the more I have to say but the less time I have to write. Things are moving really fast here now, I have projects shooting at me from all directions and time moves very quickly. To make matters more hectic, my day for doing animal chores and cooking lunch (for 10+ people) is tomorrow. All week I’ve been making menus in my head but today and Monday pretty much killed all the ideas I had planned. Monday Alex and Bryan made the roasted veggies that I had planned as a backup and today Joe made a squash soup that was my initial plan. With these two ideas knocked off my list, I regretted not having taken my genius cousin Ana’s advice when she had simply said to plan four different meals at the beginning of the week so that it wouldn’t come to this. But not being as smart as she is, by this point in the day I was beginning to flounder a little, going through ingredients in my head and starting to gradually feel more and more nervous. Luckily Andrew came to my rescue. He needed another person to come to market with him so I eagerly volunteered and Rebecca offered to cook the meal and deal with the animals. It was a close call, and though I was looking forward to the cooking challenge, I am really excited to go to the San Rafael market again. And I know there will be many more lunches to be cooked later on. Better be off to bed soon because I have to wake up at 2:30 tomorrow morning! Although I don’t really consider that morning.

Rain?

I didn’t even need an alarm clock today because the rain was beating so hard on the roof of my trailer that I woke up promptly at seven. I spent the next fifteen minutes in bed not wanting to deal with having to go outside but luckily by seven thirty the rain had completely stopped.

I guess when they say 100% chance of rain they don’t mean that it will rain 100% of the day because after that initial downpour we had no rain the rest of the day. Everyone was disappointed but in the end, the lack of rain did give us a wider spectrum of jobs to choose from. In the morning I worked in the greenhouse again and then spent the rest of the morning packing CSA boxes in the shop. After lunch I pruned roses for a few hours. I’ve been wondering if any psychologists make their clients prune because it truly is a very therapeutic ordeal. Since I’ve always had trouble making decisions it was great for me because pretty much all you do in pruning is make decisions right and left. It’s a really fun job because every plant is so different that for each rose you have to look at it and imagine its individual skeleton. This part is also totally exhausting, after a few hours of pruning I can really feel that my brain is fuzzy and tired.

I think when people imagine farming they often envision mostly manual work but I feel my brain being worked in so many directions here that I actually feel more exhausted than I did on most school days. All day today I used my brain a lot. First I spent the morning translating between Chica and Rebecca constantly and then I spent a long time trying to explain Spanish grammar to Rebecca as we packed. Then for lack of a pen, I had to do a lot of mental math to count boxes and vegetables. As I was doing the work in my head I was also thinking how the last time I had to do serious mental math was probably in fourth or fifth grade. It's so weird how in our education system you really focus so much on this in lower school but once you enter middle and high school it all goes out the window and kids all of a sudden forget how to do anything without their calculator. And I'll readily admit, I totally am one of those kids, I love my graphing calculator! Maybe I'll invest in a calculator watch one of these days just to up the geek factor.

Here by popular demand.

Greenhouse

The sun never came out today, the valley is still blanketed in a thick cover of clouds. Everyone is excited because the forecast showed a confident 100% chance of rain for tomorrow. Still haven’t made up my mind if I’m as excited as everyone else, I know rain makes for damp clothes and muddy shoes…

But I guess I did spend most of today in a wet state so it really shouldn’t make much difference. I spent all day working around the greenhouse today. First we took a tedious half hour to separate and clean all the flats and then we spent the rest of the day seeding. Every day I work I find a different thing that is my new favorite thing to do. Today working with seeds all day I grew really interested in the idea of seed saving and greenhouses. Working there with Rebecca and Chica (the Mexican worker in charge of the greenhouse planting) I could all of a sudden imagine myself working in a nursery. The seeding machine that we used was also really impressive: basically it’s a vacuum that you attach a metal tray to. The tray has little holes in it so when you pour seeds on to it they stick to the holes. Then flip the tray upside down and line it up above the flat you turn the vacuum off and the seeds fall perfectly into the flats. Presto! So so so so much faster than hand sowing.

After sowing 90 flats of chard (red, green, and gold) and 30 flats of parsley (Italian and curly), we ran out of flats so we had to make more soil mix and clean and fill more flats. The cleaning of the flats is the most annoying because when they are stored they get stuck together so you spend a long time trying to peel them apart (being careful not to rip them) and then you get wet when you have to spray them off. After they’re clean you have to fill them with soil mix that you have to make. But that part was really fun, the whole time I imagined I was baking a cake for a giant because you mix all the nutrients and soils in a huge vat with shovels and stir everything around until it’s evenly distributed. Mixing together the vermiculite, perlite, peat, phosphate and other ingredients that I can’t remember right now was like mixing batter for a huge cake. When that was done we filled more flats and started sowing seed again. In the end we only finished onion and broccoli but tomorrow we’ll start on the 130 flats of tomatoes…