Jon, who picked me up at the CSA dropoff on Saturday, is the head apprentice. This year is his second year on the farm and prior to this, he worked at the Queens County farm. In addition to his job at the Garden of Eve, he also "processes" (slaughters) chickens at a nearby poultry farm on Sundays. The guy has very little time off. He's one of those quiet guys that you just know has a lot going on inside his head. We generally didn't see a whole lot of him during the day once we got started on our list of harvesting - he would be off performing other tasks on the farm such as riding the tractor in another part of the farm, "fluffing" the dirt. I think this is basically tilling the soil so that it does not become too compacted prior to planting.
 |
| Sean and Jon, goofing around in the kitchen |
Chris has been at the farm for the whole season and was the third most experienced person there (after Rafael and Jon). He runs the farmstand at the Westhampton greenmarket on Saturdays which means getting up at 5 am to load the truck. Chris also drives the box truck around on the farm from location to location and was most generous about sharing his laptop with me during my stay. He and Jon are the only ones that will be at the farm for the whole season which I believe is March through mid-November.
 |
| Chris |
Sean was the clown of the group. A strict vegetarian, he seemed to eat a LOT of sweet potatoes - I think at almost every meal. He was always the first with a joke or the first to throw a rotten tomato and the first to help break up a serious dogfight (more on that later).
Sherita was the only woman there and I am most grateful to her for sharing her bathroom with me! The guys used the upstairs bathroom and it was not what I would call clean. She also shared her harvesting knife with me while I was there and we did a lot of stuff together during the week. I believe Sherita has been there for several months and is planning to leave in November with the rest.
 |
| Sherita |
Ted was the most recent addition to the farm. I think he had only been there a week when I arrived and was planning to stay until Thanksgiving. As previously mentioned, he was living in the yurt which was even further away from the farmhouse than the farthest part of the fields. Prior to coming to the farm, he had spent the summer working at The Hole in the Wall camp in Connecticut, which I think is a camp for kids with cancer. He always looked tired and Sherita said that the kids in the camp had just sucked the life out of him. Unfortunately, Ted was not in the kitchen on my last morning, so I wasn't able to get a photo of him.
My next post will be about the week and will be fairly condensed as harvesting and pulling weeds is rather boring, so I will mostly focus on the highlights and drama during the week.
Today's factoid from The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: "if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the U.S. became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. As much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow." Wow, this book really is an eye-opener.
No comments:
Post a Comment