Cool Hand Luke

Ever seen the film "Cool Hand Luke"? I recommend it. It contains several amazing scenes. In one, we get this bit of classic dialog:

Luke: I can eat fifty eggs.
Someone else says: Nobody can eat fifty eggs.

Okay, I guess you have to see the film. In any case, there's a scene where Luke and a bunch of men on the chain gang are laying down a road, in the heat, and the everyone is grumpy and moving slowly just hating what they're being forced to do. All of sudden Luke starts going like a mad man, tossing gravel down as fast as he can. Everyone joins in and they're suddenly enjoying it. Hootin' and hollerin' and getting a thrill out of the intensity of everything.

Well, today was nothing like that. No no, I'm kidding. Today was very much like that, minus the Luke. As a group we just settled into this incredible rhythm of work. Transplanting, like yesterday. Only today it seemed to go at a quicker, more consistent, and energetic pace. We were planting with a wider spacing (every 12 inches, and sometimes 18 inches, rather than yesterday's 6 inches), and sometimes we'd only plant two rows per bed instead of three. That really made things cook.

But more so I think it was just that we all knew what we were going to be doing, and so we relaxed into it and decided to "give 'er", rather than be so concerned about how much our back or legs hurt, etc. Or maybe this is just my experience of the day, and everyone else experienced it entirely differently. I'll have to ask.

In any case, a great day. As I say, we planted all of the brassicae (Cabbage, Broccoli, Kolhrabi, and Pak Choi), plus parsley, I think. Maybe something else too. I spent part of the afternoon baking blueberry muffins for tomorrows CRAFT day (it's a pot luck lunch at one of the CRAFT farms -- more on this tomorrow). We also layed out drip line for the brassicae and floating row cover.

I have to say I'm still coming down from the buzz of today. I think I really enjoy sustained hard work with a fast pace. It's also great to be digging around in the dirt all day. My hands, arms, and face were dark brown with dust this evening. Leslie and I noted that our cuticles have disappeared or are disappearing from our hands -- likely getting ground (get it?) away by the earth as we continually jam our hands into it.

Transplanting

Today was rather tough (but maybe that's because I'm a 'nub'). We transplanted four 400 foot beds of onions (three rows each) and two of leeks, both at a six inch spacing. So that's six beds of the twenty-one we'll be transplanting this week. Sheesh.

It was a great day though. I really enjoy this sort of sustained and focused work. Oh and, I've had the song "spanish flea" stuck in my head all day too.

Rockin' It

Today's Activities:

• Put out the rest of the onions and leeks to harden off.
  
• Transplanted plenty of tomatoes, seeded lettuce(we'll do this every two weeks), and sweet basil.
• Lunch. We had a meeting where we discussed lunch and dishwashing schedules, and other administrative stuff.
  
• Amanda (who just started today) and I put up lines for hanging the plastic liners we'll use in the boxes holding salad mix.
• Amanda, Ali, and I picked rocks for the rest of the afternoon. A good three or four hours.

Again, another beautiful day picking rocks. I might have to add this activity to my list of favourites (right up there with digging holes, turning compost, and hoeing). Again, I assert the magic inherent in the action of bending down and pulling up these sleepy rocks. Ali correctly placed the sound they make as the sound of large marbles colliding.

I'm right-handed, and today I noticed very plainly how much I favour my right side. The actions in picking rocks go something like this: walk in a direction until you notice a rock big enough to pick, bend over (either by bending at your waist... gah... or crouching slightly) and grasp the rock with one hand, and then stand up and carry on to the next rock. At this point I typically shift the rock in my right hand to the nook of my left elbow so that I have a hand free again. Picking rocks like this continues until your arms are full, it's too heavy, or you're close to a pile, so that then you head to the nearest pile and drop everything off.

The thing is that when you pick up rocks with your right hand it takes a bit of a twist at the waist and lower back as you reach down to grab it. Especially to hold on to the several rocks you're cradling in your other arm. Repeating this action for a while meant that my left shoulder got cramped up into your my neck in order to hold the weight of the rocks (I know, I know, there's no need for that, but it's a strong habit); my right arm got a bit tired at the shoulder; as was my lower back from bending and twisting; and my knees were getting a bit achy from bending and lifting.

Switching sides so that I work the left side of my body seems like an essential thing.. something I didn't do enough of today and so something I'll likely feel tomorrow. The thing is that because I must typically favour my right-side I'm so much stronger there, and so working with my left side is rather awkward and I get tired much more quickly. In other words, there's a strong physical incentive to keep favouring my right side.

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.

Transplanting Celery and the Optimal Potato Sort

Today's Activities:

• Spent the morning sorting potatoes. We managed to finish sorting all the potatoes in storage.


• Lunch.


• Transplanted celery seedlings. This is a cool process, and requires dexterity and lots patiences. The idea is this. Celery seeds apparently germinate better when they are together, rather than separated into individual cells in a tray. So, you "broadcast" (i.e. sprinkle, toss, spread, etc...) the celery seed into a tray of soil and let it sprout. Wait until it looks like so:
  
  
  Then you transplant a seedling from this mess of stuff into cells. That is, you grab a clump of seedling-laden soil, carefully break it apart so that you can extract individual sprouts, like this:
  
  
  
  
  And then place them each into a holes you've made with, say a pen, in the tray.
  
  
  
  
  Easy enough, but a bit painstaking. Something I couldn't imagine Annemarie putting up with. ;)
  
  We planted a total of 8 trays of celery, and 8 trays of chard (I think. I double check these numbers). For chard, one seed is placed directly into each cell.
  


• The rest of the day was spent doing random clean up jobs. Sweeping and tidying the farm store and another storage room; disposing of rotten potatoes leftover from the sorting process; etc..

A note about potato sorting. Now that it's over I think I can comment a little on the optimal sorting algorithm. Typically the goal is to sort the potatoes into three categories: those for sale, those for seeding, and those that are rubbish. A potato is deemed "saleable" if it is larger than, say, your average clementine. Otherwise it's probably best suited for seed.

In either case, if the potato is squishy, liquid, or smells like shit (I mean, actual shit), then it belongs in the rubbish pile. Also, sometimes we'd sort a crate of mixed white and red potatoes, in which case there's the additional task of separating the seed potatoes into reds and whites. Anyhow, the quickest and most entertaining sorting method I came up with goes something like this:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly and rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is miles ahead of some of the other ones I saw people practicing. In particular, here's a terrible method:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick up a handful of potatoes;

  for each potato in the handful {
    put it in the appropriate bin;
  }

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}

This method is far far too slow. You end up day dreaming about Tuscaloosa or something silly like that while your one hand travels to and from the other hand to the different bins. It's also, as you can tell, bottle-necked by the one-handedness of the sort, whereas the optimal method allows both hands to work independently (which, incidentally, is quite an awesome feeling).

One last thing. It turns out that there is a nasty potato-size grey area that makes high-speed categorisation decisions kinda nerve-racking. Typically what happens is that you consistently end up ignoring these ambiguous potatoes until they clutter your view so much that you're forced to deal with them in order to continue. Here's a version of the optimal potato sorting algorithm to work around this problem:

while (more potatoes to sort) {
  pick out smelly or rotten potatoes;
  pick out all saleable potatoes in plain view;

  while (more seed potatoes in plain view) {
    pick out all red seed potatoes;
    pick out all white seed potatoes;
  }

  push remaining potatoes into neighbour's sort area;

  dig around a bit to uncover more potatoes;
}