The accidental farm worker
As some of you know, I live in the Chicago area and coordinate the Tomato Mountain Farm's farmers market presence and CSA deliveries from there. My job involves a computer and a Smartphone, and an occasional trip to the farm. I'm heading into my fifth summer season working for Tomato Mountain, and in past years, January through March has truly been the "off season," a time for reflecting, planning, taking vacations, all the while marketing the CSA. So I usually had several trips to the farm, spending several
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Brian treks to hoops for spinach
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days at a time. Around early February, seed-sowing starts and the new season is officially on the way, but still at a fairly slow pace.
With our first-ever Winter CSA, however, much of the leisurely planning has given way to the demands of the here and now. I'm up at the farm to meet and help train a new bookkeeper. But due to a few sudden staff changes, I was for the first time pressed into service to do some of the farm's CSA tasks, pre-packing carrots and beets for next week's boxes. Being a small cog in the overall machinery that makes the farm go--and being in
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Crazy carrots
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closer proximity to the field, packing shed, and hoops--gave me a better perspective on the number of moving parts involved in the farm.
Chris has often equated farming with brain surgery. While the human stakes may not be as high, there are probably as many details involved and as many instant decisions that need to be made, some of them irreversible. Believe me, those crop-altering decisions weren't made by me, but even something as mundane as weighing and bagging carrots made me exercise multiple mini-decisions for every bag--the kind of decisions that a big company would likely call "quality control." Those little decisions resulted in a large pile of seconds, many of them the twisted, "mutant" carrots with two or three legs braided together. But every once in a while I'd put a beautiful freak of nature in a bag thinking that somebody's child might enjoy seeing it to get a peek at how things grow that don't make it into the bag at the grocery store, but still taste great. (If you want more of the oddballs, you can order some second-quality carrots in the store.) -- Robin
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