Picking Rocks

Yesterday's activities:

• Did the 'chores' for the animals. (Essentially just mucking out the milking stalls and giving the cows and pigs hay, and also yummy slop for the pigs).
  
• Transplanted lots of tomatoes, and peppers. This took most of the morning.
• Lunch.
• More transplanting.
• Ali and I dug up and transplanted a 200 foot row of Sweet William that survived from last year.
  
• Jarrod and I worked on resurfacing the harvest table.
• Jeff and I did an inventory of irrigation equipment and decided on what joiners we'd need for the delivery and header lines.
• Jeff worked most (all?) of the fields for veg. The intention is to break things up, kill some of the weeds -- in particular the Twitch Grass (aka. Couch grass. The same annoyance I fought with in Australia, along side Kikuyu).
  

Today's activities:

• Chores.
• Changed the oil, and oil filter, and battery on one of the white van.
• Jarrod and I made tables to fit in the van so that we could carry an extra 16 flats of seedlings out to the field.
  
• Lunch. Ali made smoothies. That's a highlight.
• I washed four crates of potatoes, two of beats, and one of rutabaga.
  
• Jeff, Jarrod, and I cleared a space along side the greenhouse, laid tarps and pallets down so as to make a space for 'hardening off' the seedlings before we transplant them. 'Hardening off' refers to giving the seedlings time to adjust to being outdoors (rather in than in the warm, moist, and very controlled environment of the greenhouse).
• The three J's then went to pick rocks from the fields.
• During this time Ali walked the fields to measure and mark them so that we know exactly where the rows begin and end.

Picking rocks is a rather fun process, especially in the afternoon. The three of us spread out about 10 metres apart and then walked the length of a field searching for rocks as big or bigger than about two fists held together (i.e. from average human brain-size to genius human brain-size up to genius Martian brain-size). There's something extraordinarily pleasant about walking under a big sky and talking about whatever (family history, television shows, garden tools, ....). All the while criss-crossing the field and lifting stones out of it, hearing them quietly clunk together as you each throw them into piles. It's the sound of rocks hitting each other that I find most alluring -- such an essential and calm sound.

Today was the first day I've felt any real sense of tiredness during the day. Sluggishness is more like it. I think it's the heat. It only lasted for about twenty minutes. I'm sure I'll meet this feeling again.

Doing the chores has been quite fun. Minus the fact that everyone calls it "chores". I've always hated that word. It reminds me of a vaguely delirious world, slightly askew from my realm of comfort and normality -- i.e. marshmallows baked on top of sweet potatoes, cottage cheese, saying Grace at dinner, face cloths, brick walls in a kitchen, etc. If I think too hard about it these things individually and out of their context they all seem just fine (in fact, I love the idea of taking a moment to cultivate a thankfulness for your food before eating it). It must just be my history, or memories I have associated with these terms.

In any case (phew!), actually doing the morning chores is great. It's a entirely new experience for me to navigate around a living chesterfield with horns (i.e. a cow), unclip it and then pat and talk it out to the paddock. The routine involves releasing each cow (just five) from the milking stalls and leading them out. These animals seem to emote surprise and a little knowing and willful stubbornness with the way they turn only their eyes back at you when you direct them to move. Then, after a moment of consideration, they give up with a small huff as if acknowledging that the outside world isn't so bad after all, and swing around to leave in a wide and lazy three-point turn.