Angel's Farm Reflection 7

Angel Arias                     Silk Tree Farm Reflection                   4/4/13

To start, I’m going to state that again, a lot happened today, a whole bunch. I brought had brought in some sproutlings that I’d started a while back (But weren’t doing too well) that were barley seeds, so I set them down for a bit, not sure what to do with them yet. After I first arrived, they were trying to get some things figured out, and the first thing that we ended up doing on the farm was prepping for peas to be planted. Which was more than just planting some peas in the ground, actually, a bunch more than that, we had to take fencing and metal drivers, then line them up with each other, drive the metal poles into the ground and tie them to the fencing and then, we could start preparing the ground to actually be planted. But it would wait for just a bit, in-between that we did some other things too, because it was a long process. I captured the conspiring rebel chicken (A chicken who had escaped his pen to our dismay; he had to be re-assimilated), split some wood, and chipped away chunks from a concrete pillar in the ground with a power tool. The wood splitting happened pretty much because I had really wanted to try my hand at it, and after a little while it really isn’t too bad, just a bit difficult to pick up. You have to look for stress marks and try and hit them; bringing the axe down with precision but also, force; as to not miss or hit it too weakly, but the axe I was using was fairly heavy (Evidently not to the point where I couldn’t use it) so the amount of force I was using was amplified by the weight of the axe. You get a real sense of accomplishment from cracking down a log in just the right spot that you don’t really get too often; it’s pretty cool if you ask me, but not easy. After that, was the time which I used the power tool to chip away chunks of concrete for a large concrete pillar in the ground. I was poking it with a shovel because I kind of wanted to move it in some form, then Tom noticed, grabbed some power tools and I chipped away at it for a while. Moving on from this tangent, we had plans to till up a bunch of land but the rotatiller wasn’t working and this was why we moved to planting the peas initially, and we went back to it at this point. We extended the previous fencing with more fencing (Surprise!) a dug a small rut into the ground beneath the fencing, when peas grow; they grow upward, so apparently they grow much better when you give them something to grow on, like a fence, for example. This is something that I didn’t know about peas, and I think that it is really cool that I am getting to learn things about plants I never knew before; and getting familiar with plants I wasn’t previously familiar with.  After finishing up the small trench, we had to gather compost in a wheelbarrow using a shovel, and then spread it onto the small, previously-created rut, again with a shovel. We then watered it valiantly and that was that for the peas. It was really cool, because there were already so many different kinds of plants that were growing in the garden, plants that I don’t think I even knew about, and there were a lot of plants that had just re-seeded themselves and come back after being harvested; another thing that I thought was really cool. We had also planned on getting some seeds soaked in vinegar, but due to some time constraints we weren’t able to do that while I was there; though, I am sure that Cathy will soak them some other and try to spout them, perhaps along with the other sproutlings that I had brought in, the barley seeds. I’m hoping that we can get something done around, and that the barley seeds fare well, moreso than they were already. Although one plus about them would be that they were more or less free of mold, and I’m also hoping to get some flax seeds started soon, which I will then bring in on Tuesday. This wraps up my day interning at Silk Tree Farm.