In Season

Based on my experiences today alone on The Farm I came up with many inspired, beautiful possible chapter titles, including:

I Don’t Want Rooster Love

Hoeing Skills (that would make any father proud)

I’m Gonna Get a Spatula After This; You Want Any?

(in reference to a jar of apple butter…. obviously)

First Taste of the Season: Strawberry

I’m Not Wearing Sunscreen Anymore, It Just Attracts the Dirt

Today I followed Farmer Thomas’s lead and plucked one bright, red strawberry right off the bush and ate it. Within a week alone berries have gone from barely visible to slightly yellowish green, to edible. There are not many, but with every step down the row I see at least one plump for the picking. My personal goal is to beat all the deer and slugs to the harvest.

I’m anticipating a decent amount hanging nicely and ready for the taking by Monday morning… Our CSA deliveries and Farmer’s Market Saturday’s are still a couple weeks away… What to do? What to do? Chris has a hankering for a strawberry pie, and I’d just love to eat them straight from the bowl.

Tomorrow marks the completion of my second month as Farm Girl, an identity I’m still trying to embrace. Dirt underneath what’s left of my stubby fingernails, freckles across my nose, the same three pair of Dickies in my Monday- Friday wardrobe rotation. (But I only wear two pair per week… yep, that’s me.) I weed carrots on my hands and knees for hours at a time, crawl through rows of onions, flame weed garlic, prune tomato vines until my fingers are sticky with a yellow and gray that doesn’t wash off with soap and water.

Plants plants everywhere. Busy days sunup to sundown. Somehow I still managed to make my Granny’s biscuits tonight and sauté up some crookneck squash (from California I’m sure.)

Chris mocking the photographer...

First strawberries of the season...

Unidentified

(first blooms on the eggplant)

The sun is setting in a light pink and lavender beyond the newly cut hay fields. Behind the trees and hills and raised beds in the far west fields of the farm. And it’s already 8:30pm. At 4:30am the sun will rise again lighting the endless sky.

…

It was as if 5:00pm would never come today. And it wasn’t even as if the labors of the day were that wearing. I’ve had more brutal days. There have been days of more pain and more sweat and physical exhaustion.  I was just not feeling it today. Soft pink daydreams of a previous life, of grandiosity; of living where I was three months ago kept spinning through my mind. I’d have rather had my hands around a Starbucks latte and a department store handbag instead of in potting soil and reeking of rotten fish.

I’m here for a season. For the honk of the geese and the breeze in the evening and the butterfly that lands on my shirtsleeve just as much as I am here for the first chard I’ll eat. Just as much as I’m here to learn about squashes and cukes and peppers and cilantro, I’m here to stand at the gate of the pigpen and watch Amadaeus and Megaton eat avocado rind and banana peels.

I’m here for the way I feel when I stand in the herbs panted between the two greenhouses: thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, lavender, and oregano

To see the six goslings living the first days of their lives near the pond by the potato patch

To drink Love My Goat red table wine- Bully Hill Vineyards

To live rent-free

To inhale bright green, tender basil leaves

To learn names of various watermelon- sunshine, new queen, sweet little flower

I have yet to taste my first Poc Choy, Arugala, Artichoke or Strawberry of the season, but I know that all this hard work will be worth it. Not that I ever doubted that, or think that living in Manhattan makes me, as a person, any more important or any more valuable- but on some days it just feels like that life- right now, in this moment- would be easier. I knew that life. That Stefani. That commute and church community and vegan restaurant and neighborhood coffee shop.

Here, at The Alleged Farm, I don’t go further than a mile most Monday- Fridays. I talk to more animals than people. I eat three meals a day with my husband and entertain myself with books or movies or puzzles or by writing letters to people I love.

I just don’t want to feel like I’m wasting my time, wasting my life. I guess it’s a state of mind. I could feel like I was wasting my life Anywhere, USA. I could feel like anything any day of the week, I guess. And today, I longed for something else. Something that Merlot and a hot shower didn’t bring after a hard days work.

Memorial Day

Today was Memorial Day. And we didn’t complete our workday until after 6:00 this evening. Today was the first day I sweat. Really sweat, all day long. Sure shoveling for hours in the greenhouse, even on a fifty-degree day, was no small chore. There have been difficult moments. And, there have been more difficult days that today, overall. But today was simply a hot day. And we were out in the field all day along.

Even after refilling my water bottle four times and drinking over sixty-four ounce of water and an Emergen-C, my head is currently rumbling into a headache. One of dehydration. (Not that the glass of Reisling I downed at 6:05 helped whatsoever.)

Even after drinking all that water, I didn’t need one bathroom break all afternoon. But I took one at 5:00pm anyway, just so I could sit down. Seriously.

I have to admit that was hopeful that Farmer Thomas’s son soccer team would excel into the final bracket of the Memorial Day Weekend Tournament and that yes, indeed they would be playing for the championship today…. Which would mean Thomas would still be in Washington DC. No such luck.

And I’ll be honest, even if he weren’t here, Chris and I still knew eggplants needed to be planted today, and we knew in which field and which rows and could have figured out which order. We are aware of some other farm chores and things that have been left undone: we could finally attach the ground cover between the green houses where the artichokes and lemongrass are now growing. We could wash out potato bins and shim-up the new door that sticks in the 144’ greenhouse. We could drive into town and fill up the propane tanks so that we could continue flaming weeding the garlic.

Then we’d have the afternoon off! You know around 2:00 or 3:00 or so. I’d read in the shade of the big tree in their front yard. Maybe make some homemade bread or head into Greenwich to get a dip of ice-cream from The Ice Cream Man. It’s Memorial Day. Everyone else is off work, right?

Turns out we planted eggplant until noon. After lunch Mike, the additional part-time farmhand that’s been working here for five years, arrived. The three of us planted tomatoes until 3:00. Then headed out to trellis the pea beds, which took until 5:00pm. I was more than happy that two strong, capable men were able to put in the stakes and heave the heavy post-pounder. Chris and I would have been out there until 7:00pm and probably in need of some marriage counseling if it would have just been the two of us. Perhaps Thomas knew this.

Mike, Chris and I found our groove. I enjoyed weaving the trellis and fitting it taught in the stakes. Of course, the pea plants are still my favorite. I think they are so feminine and delicately gorgeous. I was happy to help them. They want to climb and grow and twist those tiny little arms around something strong enough to help pull them up. Lovely girls, those Sweet Ann Peas.

The last hour of the day, I stood and watched the men work. Well, let me explain: they were trying to air up a tubeless tire that was unseated from the rim on the attachment that is used to lay plastic on flat rows. In regards to this: I’ve got nothing. I did manage to kill two yellow jackets with some spray that Thomas had brought out. They had built a nest in the attachment and he had killed most of them. I chased two more around the farm, until about 5:30 when the men got things figured out.

Then we all headed out into the field to see if the half-hour effort had been worth it. This particular piece of equipment hadn’t been used since last season. Two perfect rows later the day was complete. And I had only reapplied sunscreen five times. I was sure my arms would look like leather by nightfall.

No invite over for dinner. No burgers on the grill or, “Hey come over for margaritas after you shower,” just the end of a really long, hot day. Which was nice enough, I guess. I just had high hopes. How will I ever make it to August… ? I think I need to invest in an insulated thermos.