There was one day I was at the Wooster Square Farmer's Market. And I realized that I could get a job, working on a farm. So I thought about asking every farmer if they needed help. Then I determined that wasn't such a good idea, because what if I got hired by a bad farm? So I would just look at everyone's food, like a customer, and see which farm I liked the most.
The one that I selected was David's. It was called Starlight Gardens, and it was behind the Post Office next to the school fields in Durham. We could hear the teams practice in the afternoon. I had bought myself a pickup truck, from the Koffee Too Blackout Incident. When I realized that I could potentially get to work outside of New Haven, I felt that a farm would really be the best place, because Dunkin Donuts are the same from here to Beijing.
Maybe someday I'll learn how to cultivate rice on the 4000 year old steppes built into the hills of Southwestern China. In the meantime, I am experienced at the art of growing as much vegetation on an 8-acre farm as possible, and selling it all at MP to fancy restaurants at a great price.
That was the life, for my friend David. He ran a great farm, and I was sorry to leave when I did. He barely used any petroleum equipment. If he had oxen, he wouldn't need any. But part of the problem with the oxen was that he didn't own the other part of the hill they could graze from, even though it was completely empty of use, aside from being his neighbor's property.
There were four greenhouses, each named after a climate. Savannah, Tundra, Forest. No rainforest, though. Water was expensive. And did you know that in the Southwest, some companies are claiming, by the power of law, that water is theirs before it ever hits the ground? You're not allowed to save your own rainwater in some southwestern states, and that's against a person's freedom to prevent them from access to water. That's beside the point though.
In this relative utopia of delicious greens, freshly grown and still planted into the ground, this was our procedure everyday during the peak of summer harvest. (Other harvests, such as spring and fall, were different. And there were growing seasons. Some culinary techniques were designed to help preserve the food that needed to be eaten later. Grains are a perfect example of a food that is nutritious and could be stored.
Real security is knowing that your population has a food supply that accounts for it, in the event of a petroleum shortage or lockdown. It might be possible, in the future, for there to be a war, perpetuated by the Powers that Be. In this future foe scenario, wouldn't you know that there'd be population reduction? In the words of David De Rothchild, nature has a way of doing that, at times. And we can't really hold the wealthy accountable for the mistakes of an entire civilization. Can we?
I would certainly hope not. But I think things will change. Not in the way that people expect, though. We're not going to have a better iPhone next year, with more gadgets and gizmos than ever before. The economy is in bad shape, and the forecast says it must get worse before it gets better. How much worse is still up for grabs, but we'll know it's the end when we see signs that things are improving.
Right now, the signs are not there. But it really doesn't matter on a farm, because all of your food is right there in front of you, and the weight of the world, not to mention the troubles of a torturous military, still spread in great numbers to regions all over the world, still exist these days. I could say much more about war and the economy, but I will save that for another article later.
In the early morning, I cut the greens from the rows that we had planted just a couple weeks earlier. It was still dewy out, most of the time, at that point in the morning, if it wasn't actually raining. I timed my arrival to coincide with the moment in which I could see my hand at full length, with the change of daylight at an average of 15 minutes per 2 weeks, usually.
I cut the greens to be about 6" of clump, above the stem, mostly leaf. We only cut back the same crop twice before plowing it down and replanting it again. As I cut, with no more than a small knife, everyone's salad for the day, I placed it into a laundry basket until the basket reached the top.
Once the basket was full, I carried it back into the greenhouse with the sink and electricity. There was only one, and it was located closest to the farmhouse, where Dave and his wife lived. I would empty it out into a sink full of clean water, and swish it around in there. Then I'll pull it all out, let it drip for a second, and dunk it into the other sink, also full of clean water. This washed off the dirt.
Next, Dave showed me on my first day that there was a washing machine that had been converted to an electrical salad spinner. The heat connector was off, and the wash cycle was eliminated from its functions. All it would do was spin-dry the greens.
Once the greens were dry, I would weigh them and put them into 5 pound bags, which would then be driven to the restaurants that had bought them in advance from Dave. He did the accounting and all of the delivery. I got the prestigious task of tending to the crops, which by far was the task with the most responsibility, and I liked that. I got to know the crops, and how fast they grew. I knew when things were ready to be picked, probably a week in advance. And I would go back to pick them when I knew they were ready, and sure enough they'd be ripe. I memorized areas of the greenhouse and as the season progressed, the areas got more difficult to track, because some areas were re-planted and had a different timing about them. This made picking tomatoes much quicker, knowing where to look. It's one of the reasons that I was able to accomplish my tasks for the day in record time, compared to the other workers. It wasn't because I was stronger, or even that I knew more about farming. I just knew where the ripe stuff was, because with my memory I was able to map it all out in my head. Sometimes the satisfaction would come from plucking the tomato at a point where I was glad that I had waited just one more day to allow it to stay on the vine.
In the farm, there was a spider with bright yellow markers, otherwise entirely black. I saw my first one in a greenhouse. It scared the Bejesus out of me. I thought it could bite me because it looked big enough to have teeth. But I know that spiders don't eat people. I would not know that if I watched scary movies, and probably would have reacted with more fear if my mind was subjected to the exposure to fear. I cautiously averted making physical contact with the spider and continued picking heirlooms.
Later that day, I asked Dave what the deal was with the yellow and black spiders.
He said they were harmless.
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