timing & compost -- critical components of farming

The other day Dave (the farmer I apprentice for) told me these sage words: Farming is all about timing. Which is funny, because I had been thinking those very words for the past month. Timing on many different scales. Timing on a daily level is important for watering, for closing and opening greenhouses, for working in greenhouses. Timing on a weekly scale is important for harvesting, weeding, pruning and tying tomatoes, and for transplanting, but transplanting and harvesting are also dependent on timing on the seasonal level, as is planting cover crops and prepping fields.

As you may have noticed...

...this blog is not being updated as frequently as I might’ve liked. But now that I’m a farmer (or, more accurately, a farm apprentice – people I know who’ve farmed for years still don’t call themselves farmers. I think it’s kind of like being a Jedi Master, in that it’s a goal that as you approach it, the more modest and humble you become. Or are Jedi Masters even humble? Maybe they’re just subtle.) anyways, now that I’m working on a farm, I’ve thrown off the shackles of technology and am embracing the liberation of low-tech life.

Farmistic Impressions

Okay, so, now I know what a tractor does.

It does a lot of things. But I guess in the general sense, what it does is pull really heavy stuff over beds that you want to eventually plant things in. Like plows. And rototillers. And buckets filled with compost. And rolls of remay(sp) which is used to cover beds so that pests don't get to it (I think). And transplanters (these rigs that have two seats and these pieces of metal that trace rows in the beds so you know where to plant.)

Anyways, life on the farm is quite the change from living in the big city. Here are a couple of changes:

Before Farming

Okay. So, I'm still in San Francisco. Haven't quite yet left for the farm. Still trying to decide what shoes to bring. A little bit overwhelmed by the mountain of things left to get done before I leave. Avoiding using the first person pronoun. Drinking coffee.