Day 8 (6/22/12): Pizza Night to Pizza Night

kale and olive oil

American chop suey and almond slivers

I arrived at Winterberry Farm one week ago, on pizza night.  Tonight, the kids again congregated in the kitchen-turned-pizzeria to make dinner that night a group effort.  

However, it was a long day to get to that point.  We started early, out the door by 7am, to harvest some greens (pak choi¹ and mesclun² included) for CSA³.  We had to cut the plants out from the herb garden, shake them out for bugs, rinse them, and store them in a bucket, with a wet potato bag on top to stay moist, in the CSA section of the barn.  CSA started last Friday, just like me, and continues into the fall.   Mary tried to take on 75 members last year, and found this too many to serve well, so we have 52 members this year.  

What was supposed to be my major project for the morning took up my entire day.  I was to weed inside the rows of the herb garden, then between the rows with a hoe, and then weed and sucker the tomato plants.  Thankfully, I had a little source of entertainment.  Sage was with me all day singing songs, ‘helping’ me weed, and playing games.  By lunch time I’d weeded only the plants in the rows – not everything on my to-do list that morning.  You don’t really realize how hungry you are when you’re working outside and hot, but once you hit that cool A/C inside, I was ravenous.  After lunch, I tried to weed between the rows of the herb garden quickly to have time to spare to help Katie weed the potato rows in Field 7, but I didn’t get far.  The rain didn’t help either.  It’s hard enough to weed as is, but with rain pouring down and turning the dirt to mud, it was impossible to pick out the weeds.  I saved the worst row for last, the ‘soup’ row.  It’s one that drains all the water from the yard, it seems, but to give you an image of how deep it was, Sage was up to her knees in mud.  Sage and I played hours of 20 questions (half of the ones she chose were pieces of farm equipment I don’t even know the word for) and knock-knock jokes – I guess we played 2 knock-knock jokes.  Sage loved the interrupting cow knock-knock joke, and we practiced it at least 40 times so she could tell her family later.  We came inside and I gave Sage a bath and read her a book before dinner.  

Dinner was pizza, just like the first night I was here, just a week before.  However, we were missing cheese and tomato sauce, so we used olive oil and sautéed onions and herbs on 1.5 pizzas and American chop suey leftovers on the last .5 pizza.  While we ate, the 5 of us (Sage, Gil, Kenya, Katie, me) watched the movie Michael with John Travolta.  Only around 9:30, when everyone was getting ready for bed, did Mary return home from the farmer’s market and errands.  She’s such a hard worker, I’m exhausted just watching her!

¹ Pak Choi is a vegetable in the lettuce family.  It is commonly known in th US as Bok Choy or Chinese Lettuce.  

² Mesclun is a mixture of you salad leaves from a variety of different plants.  It originates a s a mixture of seeds that grow at a similar rate.  Since the leaves are young, they are tender and thus part of the reason for its popularity.  

³ Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Mary offers a certain number of "shares" to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership" or a "subscription") and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season. Mary has our CSA run every Friday from 10am to 8pm.  (http://www.localharvest.org/csa/)