I start with this meteorological anecdote, because it is the warmth and beauty of this place that make it not only a unique and fruitful agricultural climate, but it also is what makes working mundane jobs totally worth while. The weather and the place are the motivation I need to weed, plant, wash or bag for hours on end. Whenever I get tired of the work at hand, I think about stuffing envelopes, data entry or email blasts, which are to me the business world alternatives to the repetitive work that needs to be done on the farm. In the end, I am always 100 times happier to be here, under the sun, working the land than in an office peering from my desk enviously at the sunshine beyond my office window.
This week there is a lot of planting and preparation that needs to happen for the season. On Monday, I started off the morning weeding the onion field. So far this is my least favourite job. Essentially, we have a large field covered with 18 rows of plastic, and each piece of plastic has been punctured with six holes across and I would estimate 150-200 deep. In each of these holes is planted an onion. If my estimation is right, that is close to 19,000 onions! Weeding the onions meant reaching into each of these little holes and pulling out the weeds. Working two people per row, it took my partner and I almost 3.5 hrs to do 3 rows. Needless to say it was a lot of work.
The reason that the plants are planted under the plastic is to retain the heat and soil moisture because Cawston is such an arid environment. Also, the cover is supposed to help with preventing the weeds from growing too savagely. We'll see how that works out.
That afternoon, we moved to the next field to plant tomato plants. There are an enormous variety of tomatoes being planted at Klippers Organics, and I look forward to getting to know all the varieties. It appears that tomatoes do best when they are seeded inside and allowed to grow in a green house until about 4 inches. The trays of tomatoes are then taken out of the protective greenhouse environment and laid outside for a few days to toughen up before being planted in the ground. The tomatoes too are planted beneath plastic rows, however the tomatoes are only planted one across and require about a foot spacing between each plant. For efficiency sake, the plastic and irrigation (which is a drip line underneath the plastic) was laid in the morning, then Annamarie punctured the holes in the plastic one foot apart, we then laid the tomato plants out by each of the holes and the final step was to push the plant deep into the ground. With tomatoes, you want to plant them very deep because all the furry bits on the stem of a seedling will become roots if covered in soil. This will allow each plant to have a more extensive root system and be better stabilized from the elements.
While we organized the plants, Annamarie took care of keeping track of which varieties were planted where. (Definitely a log book day!)
Tuesday was similar. I started with weeding the strawberry field of cooch grass. I don't know much about this grass, but it's roots were plenty in our strawberry field. After 3 hrs of raking and pulling, it appeared that the situation was better, but to an onlooker they would not have believed we had accomplished anything!
The spaces between the rows of strawberries that were already planted were being mulched with straw. In one of the straw boxes we had a nice morning surprised and found five little quail eggs. Kirsten ate them for lunch.
In the afternoon, we started bagging 4lb Spartan apples still left from the fall for the upcoming Trout Lake farmers' market. Again, it is important to know how to put all the produce to use, so those apples that were too bruised or rotten to be bagged will either be dried, made into cider or fed to the chickens. I have already sliced up six of the apples and they are drying in our kitchen dehydrator as we speak. Yum!
Opening weekend last year Klippers sold around 210 bags of apples at Trout Lake. Since the weather is supposed to be a little 'damp' this year, we only bagged 160 bags which we completed in just under an hour.
My last job for the afternoon was to finish washing the chicken eggs for the market. Eggs are always a popular item at farmers' markets. Klippers sells their eggs for $6.00 a dozen and today we finished packaging 210 dozen to take to the market this weekend. Hopefully they sell!
Essentially, we start with the oldest eggs (which are really only a few days older than the newest), dump them in a big bin of water, and scrub off any dirt or crap that may be on the egg. For the most part they are pretty clean, but we also have to watch out for eggs with cracks or eggs that are broken. If they are completely broken, the eggs obviously are useless and get tossed. If there is a crack in the egg, we keep them for, you guessed it, the apprentices! Also though, I have learned if the egg is broken but you can see that the inner membrane of the egg has not been ruptured, you can still eat the egg. Having learned that membranes are designed to allow substances and particles to move in and out of it, I have decided that I would prefer not to eat the broken eggs that have their membranes intact. However, I am more than happy to eat the eggs with cracks in their outer shell or ones that or just too massive to fit into the egg cartons - I am always filled with joy when we find really humungous eggs.
In our storage trailer, we have hundreds of egg cartons that people have been so kind to return to us to use or reuse. It always makes me wonder what kind of people remember to turn in their egg cartons on a weekly basis. Who are they? What are they like? What are the life values of these people? I know it doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do, but I have been so trained to recycle that as soon as I have emptied my egg cartons or reusable bottles, they are out of my house ready for pickup. Today, packaging the eggs and seeing all the different brands and companies of egg cartons people had donated for us to use, furthered my curiosity on this subject. I am interested to meet the 'egg people' at the market and see what they are like.
In other news, Klippers might be getting a cow! I really hope that this happens because it will definitely be an awesome supplement to our current diet and decrease our monthly food bill. But a cow does need to be milked EVERY DAY. It is definitely a commitment.
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