Life on an organic farm is... smelling less like manure and more like flowers.

Smells, having a sneaky knack to trigger memories, instantly taking you back. One day weeding in the greenhouse, a whiff of a certain weed flooded through my nose, immediately taking me back to summers at my grandparent’s cottage on Conesus Lake, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. That same weed must have grown around their house and I would come across it daily. Today, as I arranged bouquets of flowers for our CSA members with Hannah, I smelled a Yarrow flower. It was the same smell of the same tall yellow flower that my sisters and I picked at my aunts house one day when I was probably seven, and dried to hang in our rooms. The scent just me think of playing with my American Girl doll....

So back to summer ’09. Today, like Dwight Schurte, I experienced the joy of beets, as I picked them out of the ground, 420 of them to be exact. Thankfully, Suzie, a CSA member who comes to work with us on the farm, joined me to help the beet picking go by faster! We mostly were attempting to pick beets that we could thin. Thinning is picking out plants, (mostly when they're still small seedlings) when they're growing in clumps, so that the remaining plants will have enough room to grow. When you plant vegetables like carrots, celery, radishes and beets, you don't transplant them, you just put the seed right it's designated row in the field. We've been using a planter, which plops the lil guys onto the ground as you wheel it down the row. The planter doesn't always evenly distribute the seeds, so you're left with clumps of them in certain spots. So thinning becomes a necessary procedure.

Along with the beets, we harvested head lettuce, prize choi, dill, green onions, radishes, kale, chard and beautiful bouquets of mixed flowers this morning for our CSA customers to pick up tomorrow. The damp, cold and wet day brought us with a down pour late morning into the afternoon, as we washed, bundled and bagged the vegetables in the milk room of the barn. The dreary afternoon saw us cleaning the bathroom and organizing plant labels, two tasks ever so deeply needing attention...

Yesterday, we filled in where head lettuces used to grow in the field, with flowers and picked sugar snap peas (trying hard not to eat more than we picked!) In the afternoon, the three of us interns and Hannah attended a workshop on gardening with plastic. The farm that held the workshop, but more like walk through, grows mainly strawberries. The rows of strawberries are covered in long bands of plastic, kept close to the grow, to prevent weeds from growing. The only holes in the plastic allow the plants to grow up through. After hours, days and weeks of weeding in all types of weather conditions, it’s easy to see why a farmer would want to invest in this type of farming! No weeding sounds pretty good to me! However, it comes at the price of using a significant amount of plastic; which most organic farmers tend to try to steer away from. For the strawberries though, the plastic could last about 2 or 3 growing seasons. It is kept on in the snow, and a drip irrigation system, like we use, is set up, where long flat tubes, placed close to the base of the plant, drips water to the soil, underneath the plastic. Never a bunch to say no to free fresh and delicious food, the four of us ventured down the many rows in search of strawberries to pick and devour. :)