Monday, April 19, 2010

Let's begin again....

Well, I'm already behind on blogging, haha. Better late than never, I guess.

I'm a farm intern!!! I love it so far. It's been two whole weeks and they've been really interesting weeks. I've already learned a lot and gotten really dirty, bruised, sore and cut myself. But, I end my day feeling like I really accomplished something, and there are physical, visible fruits of my labors...or vegetables really...haha.

I got a bad sunburn on my first day on my lower back, which was the only place I forgot to put sunscreen. My shirt kept riding up as I was working, kneeling on the ground transplanting swiss chard into the field. But, since then I've been really good about sunscreening all over and I'm not getting burnt. I am still getting a little tan though, which is nice. The weather has been great, all except for Tuesday of this past week. We had three people show up to work for the day to help, apparently from an ad on craigslist. It was chilly and drizzling off and on all day. One of the day laborers quit before noon, but the other two came back. My brother came up Wednesday through Friday then, which was cool for him and luckily worked out well. It's been great to have the extra help to plant potatoes and transplant onions. A couple of the guys actually came back this week to help out some more.

I'm kind of jumping all over the place, but this would be a ridiculously long post if I talked about all the cool stuff I've done. I've gotten to drive the tractors quite a bit, which is a lot of fun actually. Apparently I'm a natural at it. The tractors aren't really big, the back wheels are maybe 3 feet in diameter. One is really easy to drive, it's kind of like an automatic transmission, but the other one is much more complicated. We've been using the one easier tractor with a trailer on it to spread mushroom soil on the fields for fertilizer. The other tractor has been used to load the trailer with mushroom soil and till the soil after the mushroom soil has been spread. I didn't get to load the mushroom soil, but I did get to till the fields.

Last Saturday I worked at the next to last winter market of the Phoenixville Farmers Market. It was so much fun to work at the market. I got a writing assignment that I really need to work on about my perspective of shopping at the market, working at a restaurant and working on a farm now. The winter markets are short, only an hour, but the weather was great for this one, so it was really busy and the hour went by really quickly. I'm really looking forward to working at the farmers markets throughout the season. I like the social aspect of this job and telling people about the veggies and good ways to eat them and how they taste.

I'll try and keep posting, but it's hard to sit down and take the time to think about what to write in the evenings.  Lame excuse, I know.