Guest Writer:
Robert Brown
It was just after 4 am when Brooke
got out of bed to get dressed and to go with our son, Kevin, on the deliveries
he would make to Hebron, NH, and Cambridge, MA. They wouldn’t be returning until after 7
pm. I smiled as I rolled over to go back to sleep. That could have been me,
plus the irony of Brooke getting up early any day was not lost on
me.
The day usually starts with
breakfast at 5:30 am at Groundworks Farm, except on delivery days, but I was
sleeping in—until 6. After all, I’m retired. My legs were complaining loudly
to me from the constant bending over while harvesting the day before, but I
reassured them that today would be easier.
I hobbled out to start the day at
7, one hour after Margaret and their helper Kevin A. had begun. The first job
was sowing seeds: kale and lettuce for fall harvesting. I smiled. My legs let
out a sigh of relief. The instructions were simple, just one seed per
indentation. You don’t realize how difficult it is to put just one little seed
in each indentation until you try it. Margaret quickly and smoothly fills tray
after tray, as I struggle to get the seeds to drop one by one. Oops, five fell
into that one, better move on, darn three in that one. Well, someone is going
to be thinning a bit. The lettuce seeds were worse. They look like tiny grass
seeds, and they don’t roll out of your fingers easily. But we finished with
seed to spare.
Next on the list was harvesting
onions. My legs said, “hey wait a minute,” but I pointed out that they had just
gotten a couple of hours of rest, so suck it up. Onion harvesting is quite
musical, actually. The tops of the onions stick out of a small hole in the
black plastic that they grow in. You grab the onion and as you pull the onion
through the tiny hole, the plastic stretches and rubs against the onion skin,
causing a squeaky noise followed by the pop of the onion as it escapes the hold
of the plastic. I liked that. My legs could have cared less. We made several
trips to the greenhouse to spread the product out to dry. The heat was intense
in the greenhouse, and that slowed me down. Margaret only left me once, though
I took advantage of that to go into the house to down a quart of water. But I
did have a long walk back to the onion field for more onions, and that musical
sound. Squeak, pop. We harvested a lot of onions before lunch. The greenhouse
floor is filled with drying onions.
After lunch we finished the final
row of onions, one where the weeds in the walkway had grown so tall that a
machete would have been useful to get to the product. We didn’t have one, but
we muscled our way to every onion in the ground.
Next on the list was something
less physical: transplanting kohlrabi. Margaret gave me the job of punching
three rows of holes into the black plastic , eight inches apart. I was in heaven
because I got to use their “toy” hole-puncher. It is a wheel with spears every
eight inches on an axle attached to a four foot long stick with handles. As you
steer the wheel down the bed, the spears make popping sounds when exiting the
plastic. More music! Then we transplanted: plunge two fingers into the dirt,
drop in the plant, and cover. The hard part was getting them to come out of the
flats in one piece. Margaret did most of that, thank
goodness.
That job is now done, and the
bending over has finally put my legs on life support. But we have one more
project: weeding carrots. I kneel for this one so that I can pull grass and
weeds away from the small carrots, cringing when I pull a weed and find a carrot
in my hand as well. But most carrots survive me, surprisingly to me at least.
By 4:30 pm I am sitting on the ground while weeding because I can’t kneel very
well anymore.
Margaret then asks me a question.
“If Kevin were here, what would he have you do until 5:30 when dinner will be
ready?” I sense a trick question, but somehow I come up with “By now he would
be worried I might die on him, so he would give me the rest of the day off.”
That seemed to satisfy her. I offered to write her farm news for her which
thrilled her. As we completed the weeding Margaret was singing Willie Nelson’s
“Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys.” We both knew she meant
farmers.
So now I am writing this as the
sun sets behind the mountains to the west and as the radio plays soft country
music. More music. I am smiling. The day’s music has been lovely. My legs
have a different opinion. They tell me this isn’t what I envisioned in my
retirement. So what? I don’t listen to
them.
