Day 18 (7/2/12): Welcome, Jillian!

I truly love dogs.  With Rosemary in my care while the family has been gone, I’ve been feeding her and taking her outside, and aside from getting into the trash, she’s an extremely well-behaved and obedient dog.  While I was doing abs downstairs this morning, she kept trying to cuddle with.  Love that dog.  In hopes to beat the heat a little and to look forward to an early finish, I started the day early at 7:30.  Because the summer squash are flowering, I had to roll the Remay up from them to enable the bees to pollinate them.  Holding the Remay while rolling it proved to be an excellent workout for my forearms, each row in the fields being ~100m long.  I weeded the rest of the footpath with the stirrup that I’d started in Field 5 yesterday.  Next I was to squash all of the bugs and eggs¹, particularly those of squash bugs, on the summer squash, finding many patches already hatched and covered in baby squash bugs.  The eggs are generally found on the bottom of the leaves, and killing the squash bugs creates a pungent odor of rotten bananas and the likes.  

Katie and I took a break for lunch, during which time I made a phone call Mary wanted me to make.  At a MOFGA workshop a couple weeks prior, Mary had met a woman who makes Earth Looms.  An Earth Loom is built into the ground and serves as a reflection of the community.  Visitors to the farm will be able to weave ribbons, twigs, grasses, hay, etc. into the loom and at the end of the year there will be a beautiful tapestry.  The lady said she would call back after her class, but hasn’t, so I’ll try again tomorrow.  Katie had been feeling tired and nauseous all day, and thinking it might be low iron, I shared one of my iron supplements.  It started pouring promptly as I was preparing to go outside again.  

I weeded, suckered, and wrapped the tomato plants in the lower hoop house (the upper hoop house tomatoes are getting such large green tomatoes already) in the rain and went out to de-bug the summer squash in Field 4 during the dry spells.   I weeded another footpath in Field 5 (2 more to go), although it’s harder when the ground is wet because the hoe doesn’t slide as easily through the ground, and picking up the grass makes the bucket a lot heavier with the dense wet mud sticking to the roots. Mary wants all the footpaths of Fields 4,5,6 and 7 to be weeded by the end of Tuesday.  I’m not sure that’s going to be an achievable task.  I finished in the Fields by 5:40 to help Katie chase the chickens into the coop – 32 chickens take a long time to chase in, especially when I’m still a little nervous about picking them up.  

My new night splint for my plantar fasciitis arrived in the mail today, as well as a card from my friend, Abigail Rose.  We had chicken with bar-b-cue sauce for dinner, too tired to go down to the field to get veggies for a salad, although I did finish off the kimchi² (new favorite food). 

The big even of the day was the new apprentice arriving.  Jillian is a 20-year-old from Mississippi (without a southern accent), a sophomore at Carleton College, and has spent the past 2½ months studying (not Japanese) in Japan.  She’s  got the curliest brown hair and nice blue eyes.  We will be roommates for the rest of the summer in our 3^rd floor renovated attic.  After giving her a tour of the house and the yard, we crashed watching the Daily Show and went to bed – Jillian had been up since 3:15.  

¹ squash bug eggs 

² Kimchi (aka gimchi) is Korean dish of spicy pickled cabbage.  Kenya included cabbage, carrots, and garlic, among other ingredients, and her kimchi is purple.