Hello to anyone who might be reading this blog post, My name is Michael and I’ve just finished my first week of my pinternship on Long Table Farms! Located in Durango, Colorado, Long Table Farm is a vegetable farm that I have has the pleasure of on for the past week.
This week has been eventful and intense to say the least. On Monday we ended up being 2 hours late due to a mixup the the actual location of the farm but made it there nonetheless to our wonderful mentors Morgan and Kate. Morgan and Kate are wonderful people who really opened up the farm to us in a way where we felt included and “part of the team.” After our introductions, which included many apologies from both sides due to the nature of our tardiness, we took a tour of the farm and met some of the other volunteers that were there that day. Kaleigh(another Pintern, and a cool one at that) and I were then assigned to harvest different types of kale, chard, and collards. After this we helped out some of the other volunteers with some weeding that needed to happen. There are a lot of weeds involved with organic farming, but it helps to prove how biodiversity creates healthier ecosystems and tastier veggies. This was most of what we did on Monday.
Tuesday started off much better than Monday because we actually knew where we were going, we started off the day harvesting garlic where I was tasked with the curing of the garlic. This process included cutting off the scapes, which is the top part of the garlic plant which will eventually flower, cutting this promotes the nutrients in the garlic plant to move to the bulb, rather than sending it to the scape. After removing the scapes I had to hang all the garlic, which I really enjoyed for some strange reason, not entirely sure how to describe and convey my reasons for loving tying up garlic in an old barn, but its really fun. After the garlic we had to do some more harvesting including harvesting cucumbers and some other veggies that i’m not remembering on this Sunday afternoon. From here I went to help Kate box up food for the farms CSA(Community Supported Agriculture) members. And with this, Tuesday at the farm was over.
Wednesday, oh Wednesday, what a rainy day you were! Though it was raining it was still a productive day filled with so much weeding. so. much. weeding. But its unavoidable with organic farming and its a fantastic indicator of the health of the soil at long table farms. The rain was a very nice break from the cruel unrelenting force of the sun. Just as we decided to start doing some planting, the sun decided that it was time to come back out and blast us with heat! But we love the sun. I also found a bee on Wednesday too!
Thursday was rough. After its hiatus on Wednesday, the sun had returned and was out for revenge and it got me good. Due to dehydration, being overworked and probably some other influences, I succumbed to a migraine and had to go home for the day, I did last 4 hours at the farm though!!
Friday I was back and raring to go and I was excited to get back to the farm. Saturday’s are farmers markets for Long Table Farms so we had some harvesting to do! Kaleigh and I started by harvesting some Swiss Chard which had the most fantastic coloration and a wonderful smell. After the Chard, it was time for the Arugula. Arugula smells so good, its very spicy but also fresh, very fun to harvest! From there I did some weeding in the Tomato tunnel(which is such cool aptly named tunnel), and ended up smelling like tomato plants, according to Kate at least… Up next was getting all the wonderful food we had harvested ready for the farmers market!
Thats it! My week at the farm, now time for my extra circulars. I made a lot of friends this week. I have a couple friends who are already located in Durango so I used them to find and meet new people, who thankfully I got along with super well. My room mates are also so cool, Momo and Steven are both super sweet and amazing people. I had a hard time going grocery shopping and didn’t get to it until Tuesday, I had some weird meals up until then.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed
There are no comments published yet.