Spinach Queen!

The past few weeks I’ve really taken to cutting spinach, and so have been designated as ‘The Spinach Queen’, which means I get to harvest it every day J .  It’s really made me appreciate how important weeding and watering is.  The difference between a bed that was well weeded and watered and one that was not makes for two very different harvests.  I’ve been cutting around 15 boxes a day, which, in a well tended bed, usually takes me a good hour and a half.  If it’s weedy and brittle that tacks on an extra half hour or so, which is a lot of time especially when it’s a delivery day. 

On Thursday, Bobby does deliveries, but yesterday we had so many orders that I had to drive a second truck in!  It was quite the intense morning - not rushed, but definitely fast paced.  We had a huge harvest to do, and it all needed to be washed, packaged, and loaded into the truck by noon.  Now that we all have a better idea of what we are supposed to be doing, we’ve been able to move more efficiently throughout the day without constant instructions or reminders.  Our system is this: at 6:30 we start out harvesting the salad greens together.  Once you finish cutting your green into boxes you bring a cartload of the boxes into the packout and water them in (it’s like giving the produce a little drink of water to hold it over until we wash and package it).  Then you sign up on the white board (by putting your initials in the circles next to whatever vegetable is listed next) and get going.  This system gives us a chance to harvest all of the crops - something unique about working on this farm (most farms will train employees on one crop, and that is what you do all day long). The crops are listed in order of importance, as the first crops (usually greens) are more likely to wilt as the sun rises. 

Heading out for the morning

As the days go by, more and more crops are ready for picking!  We’ve started in on the basil, sweet peas, broccoli, beets, parsley, and zucchini – on top of the radishes, salad greens, lettuce, chard, kale, spinach, garlic whistles, cilantro, and green onions that we’ve been doing for some weeks now.  My garden has really taken off as well, though nothing is ready to harvest quite yet.  I made a better effort to weed and water it this week, and I think it really made a difference judging by the look of my plants.  It’s amazing how a plant can change, seemingly, overnight.  I feel like there is so much I haven’t learned about plants, gardening, farming, etc. and that time is running out!