Week Numero Uno

The days have been intense.  The learning experience on the farm is about breadth, not depth, which means that I'm dipping my toes into the vast pond of organic farming.  After five days, it feels as if my brain is about to explode.  In a good way.  The highlights?  It's a toss-up between making breakfast (frittata, zucchini/cranberry muffins, oatmeal) for twenty people with one of my classmates and harvesting hundreds of pounds of potatoes with the group.  Digging up potatoes is a trip.  You kneel, sink your hands into the cool, loose dirt, and find little hidden treasures called Russets, fingerlings, and two other varieties with romantic-sounding names that I can't remember.

Generally speaking, our days will contain some sort of combination of hands-on farmwork, lectures/didactic, and field trips/site visits to other farms and places of interest in addition to daily chores. If I had a billion dollars, I'd send everyone to farm school.

Here's a sample schedule for the week:

Monday

7 am: breakfast

7:30 am: field work - bean, broccoli, Swiss chard, eggplant and mesclun greens harvest

12 noon: lunch

1:15 pm: field work

Tuesday

8 am: breakfast

8:45 am: fence building workshop with the focus on electric fencing and lots of discussion about Joules, amps, volts, resistance, and general consternation about how painful it is to get zapped

12 noon: lunch

1:15 pm: forest ecology walk

Wednesday

8 am: breakfast

8:45 am: animal orientation - pigs, cows, chickens, sheep

12 noon: lunch

1:15 pm: orientation to the kitchen garden; apple picking; seed planting of winter greens

5:00 pm: Community Life meeting and dinner

Thursday

8 am: breakfast

8:45 am: fence building practicum

12 noon: lunch

1:15 pm: field work

Friday

8 am: breakfast

8:45 am: orientation to daily chores; scary video about tractor safety

12 noon: lunch

1:15 pm: field work - potato digging

4:30 pm: start daily chores

Next week, the beginning and end of our days will be "bookended" by chores, which means that the work day will be longer.  The faculty has eased us into this schedule and has been doing all of the farm chores this week.  Next week I'm assigned to house chores with two other classmates...sweeping, mopping, laundry, cooking breakfast, taking out the trash, feeding the cats, bringing in the Boston Globe from the mailbox, etc.  Each week will be different...other chores involve the care of each group of animals - pigs, chickens, cows and sheep (oh my!).

Our days revolve around food...harvesting, preparing, cooking and eating.  I'm not a great cook, but I can feel the stirrings of interest and excitement around preparing food for large numbers.  I am so struck by the idea of determining your meal plan based on what's currently growing in the garden.  Do you want eggs for breakfast?  No problem...the chicken coop's just out back.  Have a hankering for eggplant Parmesan?  Well I'll be...we just picked some yesterday!

Favorite aesthetically-pleasing food of the week: the mini Mexican cucumber.  Do these look familiar?