Angel Arias Silk Tree Farm 3/30/13
Today was a really fun day that had been packed with things to do, things that had to be polished that had not been completely done, and entirely new things all together. In the morning before we went out, I looked over to the table and to my surprise I noticed…sprouts. But not really sprouts that were too similar in comparison to the other sprouts we did, these ones were doing quite well and had also been going for a bit, from the last Thursday prior, if I remember correctly. These ones had been soaked in peroxide, for sterilization, and I remember that because last Thursday (When they were soaking) I asked about what they were in and why it was bubbling a bit. The peroxide was cleaning their hulls and during that process, the peroxide mixture bubbled a bit while cleaning impurities off them; and, it was more morally comforting than soaking them in bleach. Cathy also said that she was going to let them go until at least Thursday, to see how they do given the time constraint to that extent. When we went outside, we started doing some more work on the rooty land nearer the back of the farm. I didn’t really know what we were going to do at first; we both started off with rakes to scrape up the roots and a machete to cut them. But then, as I started to chop down a bunch of roots I discovered that I had an affinity for slashing at roots with the machete. So I continued to do that for a while, and let me just say, hacking at roots, particularly the bigger, thicker roots that are typically connected to trees can be very draining work. But the feeling of accomplishment you get when you swing really hard and it just splits underneath the pressure of your swing is awesome. After doing a bit or raking, and doing a bunch of hacking, Tom returned and started digging up some trenches where we going to plant some of the plants we already had going in the seed starters. I think some of it may have been red lettuce, and the rest were all variations of lettuce. Not all of it went into the ground though; Cathy told me that she was going to be selling some of the seed starter racks as packed, priced accordingly for people to grow on their own. We dug the trenches, and during that I had to run and grab some compost from the greenhouse to add to the trenches. First I had to wait for Tom to grab out some of the wild tomatoes that been growing in the compost itself, which went into buckets of moist soil. After that I grabbed a bunch of compost and started delivering it liberally into the trenches that hadn’t been filled in yet, trying to get in enough so that I could spread it around in the trench for the plants to have access to. I believe it was about right after this that Tom started yanking at a tree stump that was in the ground. Then he said that it was a tractor job, and I went to get the tractor. He moored a loop of rope to the end of the tractor over a bulb, and underneath the stump. After a bit of learning what to do, and some reversing and accelerating, the stump yanked out of the ground, done and gone for. After taking a bit of a break, we headed back outside and started working on the chicken coops. I was forking and then raking the remains of what was unfinished in the smaller coop, while Cathy got to work on the larger one. While I was walking on the smaller one, being right next to a tree there were some roots that were getting in the way of my digging and raking. I was only able to tolerate it for so long before I grabbed the machete again and started eliminating some of the ones that were more in the way. After I was eventually completed with this task, I started walking over to Cathy, pitchfork in hand ready to do some work when I heard some familiar noises from the front of the house. My ride was there to pick me up; I had completely lost all sense of time. That was the end of my day at Silk Tree Farm.
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