Day 5 (6/19/12): Sun bonnet

I did my first interval bike workout this morning through Belgrade Lakes and into Rome.  I was thankful that there aren’t any stop lights or stop signs through town because my front breaks still don’t work properly.  As per the routine, I talked to my Mom, ate breakfast (we had bananas!), and was out the door by 8.  While watering both hoop houses, I needed to kill more cucumber beetles on the cucumber plants in the lower hoop house.  There were just as many as the day before, and even more eggs to pick off and squish, too.  My least favorite part of the day, I’d say, is watering the melons in the lower hoop house.  Melons are relatively fragile plants, so they must be cared for delicately.  They’re covered with Remay in the hoop house and they must get sufficient water, so instead of pouring water over the Remay, I must bend down and lift the staple holding down the Remay to get to each melon plant – it’s hard on the knees.  A new task for the day was to weed in between the rows of the lower hoop house.  I used a stirrup hoe¹ to cut out the very few weeds growing between the black plastic rows.  

Now off to do more squash planting for the day, I really looked like real farmer, as Ellie told me.  I used my mom’s big ol’ sun bonnet that afternoon when it was sunny, and had my knee pads on to protect my knees from the gritty ground and to give them some cushioning.  My knees are killing me from all of the kneeling I’ve been doing, I hope I won’t have to do this every day!  I planted a whole row of squash before lunch.  Again, I cut holes in the plastic (~8 in wide and 32 in between sides), dug up and loosened the dirt, made a hole (~8 in deep), threw in a handful of compost, drowned the hole with water, transplanted the seedling into the puddle, and covered everything with dirt again.  

For lunch, Ellie had set out turkey salad sandwiches and chips, and I enjoyed my meal while rolling my foot on my frozen water bottle (for my plantar fasciitis) and reading a 1995 National Geographic about Ndoki².  Mary has a ton of National Geographic’s sitting out from the 90’s, and it’s humorous to look at their technology and car ads because their very outdated.  

After lunch, I watered the seedlings in the upper hoop house again and Katie and I headed down to plant another row of squash before the end of the day.  Especially on the Carnival Squash today, I found a ton of Squash Bugs, the ones that resemble stink bugs and smell like a sour Laffy Taffy.  Many of these bugs were mating, so again, it was easier to find them and squish them, although these I try to squish with my gloved hands since they smell bad and have a lot of guts.  Because we finished soon, I cut holes in the black plastic of the next row to prepare for the next day’s planting.  After showering and a dinner of cheesy potatoes, ham, and buttery green beans, Ellie took us out for ice cream (again!) at the original Maine Gifford’s ice cream shop on the Gifford’s family farm.  On our way there and back, we drove through Oakland (where Ellie’s parents retired), through Waterville, and through Colby College (another NESCAC).  Katie and I finished up the day with watching The Daily Show on Hulu and researching 4chan³ and Anonymous⁴.  Before bed, I was able to talk with Abigail Rose and Lily for a bit.

¹ A stirrup hoe resembles a horse saddle stirrup and has screws in it purposefully use so that it can be dragged it back and forth on the ground to cut out any weeds and their roots underneath.  Other hoes that we use are the collinear hoe and the long-handled diamond hoe, although I’m not sure of their exact purposes, as I haven’t used them yet.  

² Ndoki is part of a preserved tropical forest in Congo with some of the last territory that has been untouched by humans.  One of the primary purposes of the National Geographic expedition was to study the quickly fading Forest Elephants. 

³ 4chan is a website that has categories you can explore, but has no archive.  People can post whatever they like anonymously – completely anonymously.  4chan has been the founder of phenomena such as LOLcats and Memes.   (http://www.4chan.org/)

⁴ I’m still not quite exactly sure what Anonymous is, but I understand that  it’s a group of people that are able to hack and stay one step ahead of government security, it seems.  They are the ones responsible for the Wikileaks.  A woman was able to interview some of them and she wrote a book called, “We Are Anonymous,” and she was interviewed on the Daily Show.  (http://www.hulu.com/watch/372277)