Fri 12 May 2006
When I was 13 or so, about the age my oldest daughter is now, I took a job on a local farm. Where I grew up we were surrounded by farms and orchards, but our 2 acres wasn’t adjacent to any farms itself. For one reason or another the farm I was employed at for the season was a 30 minute bike ride away.
Myself and three others worked for a family who raised all sorts of vegetables. We arrived before 7 and worked until the heat of the day stopped us–around 12:30 or one and if it cooled off, sometimes later.
I don’t remember how large the farm was, and really didn’t have much to do with planting, just harvesting. It seems to me there were corn fields not close to the farm that we had to drive to. At some point it must have been a dairy farm because there was a milking shed, but I don’t remember livestock, just a portion of the barn turned into a market for customers to drive up to and buy freshly picked produce. Sometimes we pickers were there to help with sales. I remember the farmer, his wife and little children–probably 5 and 7–treated us like we were family. We could eat whatever we picked–if we wanted to–and when it was raining hard, or if we arrived early and the farmer wasn’t ready we could wait in the sparse utility room in the farmhouse.
There was a pond somewhere on the farm, or adjacent to it because often while picking we would mitch off and go for a swim. I remember a huge bees nest we couldn’t help aggitating each time we passed. We could do this because we weren’t paid by the hour, but by the bushel and by mid morning we knew how much of what we needed to pick and what was needed first. Each day we would pick a variety of crops. Berries, Tomatoes, Eggplants, and 6 or seven kinds of peppers–sweet, hot, bell.
Somewhere between the beestings, the prickly spines on the eggplants or tricking a new picker by placing one sweet pepper on a bushel of hot ones, picking it, biting in to it and telling the boy to have one they were good. . . . I was infected. Infected with the sweet smell of soil, the herby vegatative smell of the garden in the heat of summer, the taste of produce unlike any I had had before: ripe, crunchy, heady with flavor. And the hot summer exhaustion of hard work, stolen moments in a dusty barn, and the livestock and wildlife around a small farm.
I had tried my hand at gardening on my own before. Although both my parents were children from large farming families we did not live on a farm and they grew flowers, not food. I sated my love for fresh vegetables and the bliss of well laid out garden beds by stealing vegetables from the garden the next door neighbor carved out of the woods on their back acre. At dusk in the summer I would creep from the green canopy and make my raid and wander the paths in the gloaming light, selecting whatever looked good to eat fresh and raw. Then came my summer of bushel after bushel of all sorts of vegetable. Who needed to pack a lunch, there was so much to graze on.
I only worked one summer for the farmer. Don’t remember what I did after that. I can remember almost every detail of the farm, what was grown, how to get there and what we did each day, but I can’t remember the times after that. Somehow all this has lain dormant until today, a cold spring day with wierd weather. I’ve been outside wishing for the same heat in the garden beds as in the Polytunnel. Wishing more were ready to harvest. Wishing I had enough land, produce, customers to have a team of kids shuttling around the place with old wooden bushel baskets, mitching off to go for a swim in the bay, and learning how sweet life can be when your connected to the land and the source of what we eat.
Technorati Tags: memories, childhood, farming, farms, produce, vegetabes, farmlife
Popularity: 7% [?]