Food Adventures

Today is Friday, wow! Ended up with a long day at the farm today, we've been doing lots of different activities. We bunched oregano and thyme to be sold. Only made 15 bunches but it took 1 hr! Labor intensive stuff, sort of understand why herbs are expensive now I suppose, but oh so lovely to have one's own herb garden! We also planted some long rows with napa transplants and celery this week! The long rows take a while, we have to make holes, dip the transplants in compost and oyster shells, then plant them. Planting took a while, I become very aware of my body positions...mostly the squat, but a little bit of kneeling or sometimes leg out...and I really favor bending my right knee! After planting we put row cover over them, which I think would be a comical bride's veil for a farmer. What a long train! We weigh it down with bricks or dirt. We also planted some flowers, we've been doing a long row with quite the assortment! Many sunflowers, strawflowers, zinnias, alyssu...

both my host kitchen here and the kitchen situation at slide ranch were microwave free, and id say ive learned more or less how to live without one...so perhaps this will be a turning point in my kitchen planning. my reading for class this week also informed me of the many cooling and refrigeration schemes of the US/globalized industrial agriculture and reminded me that this refrigeration is like entropy and requires lots of energy and hmmm perhaps there is more to be mindful here in terms of refrigeration use and also what products we buy. also made me think of cellar history and class talks on preservation and all that...so many things to consider! what new activities and sights from the past few days of farm work? we did a lot of planting! direct seeding of arugula, cilantro, carrots, and squash, and bok choy. we also did tiny transplants of broccoli and broccolini, and have some napa and celery transplants ready to be planted. they have to be watered a lot, and we add kelp emulsion...

 arugula pops up like a weed in the furrows, so tuesday i decided to harvest some to take home and cook. added it with some other veggies to cook down with mirin and shoyu and eat with udon noodles. yummy stuff! been thinking a lot about the connections between agriculture and the military industrial complex, as we drive through salinas and see large tractors and machinery that feels pretty war-like. there are actual ties between machinery, as well as chemical inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, nitrate haber bosch stuff) that are used in industrial ag. beyond these physical components i am also thinking about the ideological 'man vs nature' warfare mindset that can be part of agriculture –how do we fight the gophers or the weeds or the climate and control it in order to produce food? talking to my hosts i've definitely learned that there is a lot of animosity towards wildlife that is a potential threat to crops, such as birds, and that farmers will take measures to scare them ...

i am getting to know the weeds very well. there is the amaranth and the mallow, which are huge and domineering but come out quite easily, occasionally requiring a 2-handed pull. theres the grassy things, that can be quite annoying as the leaf sometimes separates from the root. there's a vine-y thing with little berries, and then there are all these random little things. and of course there is purslane, my favorite edible weed, although i have not actually harvested any to eat here. the weeds are our project and i come at them with an affectionate vengeance, a dance of squatting, sitting in the furrows, or sometimes getting serious and standing up with the back-bending yanking. everything goes to the sides of the rows and will dry and then become OM for soil. we got through the sweet potatoes, so now those lovely little plants have less competition and more sunlight access. whee! earlier this week, i got to spend some quality time with the celery, and with the smell of chicken poop....

i have been thinking about waste and my notions of it. as in most all of the food experiences i've had, we have excess produce here that doesn't end up getting eaten. my conception, and one of the things that stresses me out most about our food system, is how much food goes to waste– especially because there are definitely people who could eat it! while i still strongly think that we need to rebuild our food systems to create better production and DISTRIBUTION practices to prevent this waste, i am also trying to challenge my notion of waste because i realize it is informed by internalized logics around the need for natural resources to be utilized and produced for consumption and this feels like some deep ingrained capitalism or something so im like WHOA lets take a step back. i think my appreciation of flowers this summer, seeing the beautiful dahlias and marigolds and sweet peas at Slide this summer was the start of my 'waste' reimagining. we do not eat these flowers....

 the beginning of a new adventure! i am spending a month WWOOFing on a farm in Salinas, living in Marina with the family. Marina is an interesting town, and I'm curious to explore more. it is a mix of sand dunes and housing development type residential areas, but i have easy access to the Fort Ord National Monument trail system from the house, so morning run prospects are great! it is fun exploring this new ecosystem. i also want to make it out to the beach and dunes there, which is just a short drive from the house. the meandering paths of the residential area makes for good walking, and im pleased that the air quality has improved so that i can get back to my morning run, afternoon walk routine. how nice to be outside again! the academic portion of the Harvest Corps is basically a speaker series! this week's theme is soil and microbes, so we've heard about composting systems on a farm in New York and urban garden in the Bronx, and also talked to a mushroom guy -he's a...