Day One: Hoop House, Spinach, and Spotting

My fingernails are dirty! I was hungry for my meals! I was in the sun all day! I feel alive!

One of the most exciting things about this experience is that I know NOTHING about what I'm doing, about farming. So every little thing that Eric mentioned today was new. For example, Eric said to handle the plant starts (Ace peppers) by the leaves as we spotted (transplanted) them because a it is more likely to recover from a damaged leaf than a damaged stem. Or when my co-farmer Annika told me what she had previously learned about the asparagus: that you can't harvest it for the first three years as it gets established, so you really need to invest into that patch long term in order to get any results (and thus, asparagus is one of the few crops that is not rotated).

The first thing we did this morning was to put plastic on the hoop house. That was one BIG piece of plastic! I learned that the hoop house is not like the green house next door to it because it is not heated. On a nice day like today (upper 70s!) we lift the sides up in the morning and put them down at night. We covered it because the green house is about full to the gills and we are needing more space to put all the "baby plants" (technical term).

We then headed out to the spinach patch with hoes. We hoed as many rows of spinach as we could before lunch. I think I did about two and a half loooong rows before we headed in for lunch. And what did I eat? Well, fresh spinach salad, of course!

After lunch we spotted plants for the rest of the afternoon. I worked on Ace Peppers most of that time. These peppers were seeded on the first of March, so spotting means that we were moving each little baby sprout to it's own baby container. And again, baby is the technical term here. Achem.

I invited my two co-farmers over to the shed for happy hour (about 50 feet away from their residence). We sat in the grass, drank a beer each, and soaked up the setting sun. Then we went for a walk to the neighboring farm across the highway. Why? To see a handful of new calves that were born this weekend! One of the calves was bounding in circles around it's mama; it looked like a dog that was begging for someone to play with it. So cute!


My hands are already feeling a bit rough. That's with the use of gloves part of the day and with one application of farmer's salve, too. Wonder what they'll feel like at the end of summer? We shall see!

My coworkers each took a shower at the end of the day. Does farming mean that I have to shower every day now? Don't tell them, but I'm gonna sleep on this one...without showering beforehand.