Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Farming at last!

For all those people that got a little depressed after reading our last post, fear not! All that driving was worth it! We're here in Fort Jones, California in this beautiful valley farmin' grain!!! And it's good good fun. This farm is great, and we're learning a lot and getting more and more excited every day to grow grains and legumes for our CSA when we get back. It's so so fun and worthwhile, I think. We've been at Windborne Farm with Jennifer Greene for a week so far and we're getting into the swing of things. We're done some cool stuff so far such as seeding chickpeas, beans, heirloom corn, buckwheat, millet and cowpeas. We've been hoeing lentils and moving tons of irrigation wheel lines which are those big aluminum pipes on wheels that farmers round here use to irrigate their field crops (all the farmers around us use them to irrigate their acres and acres of alfalfa). It's been really great. This week, Jennifer's got a CSA drop-off so we've been watching her beautiful mill in action as well as her nice seed cleaner (the old kind, you know, we had one at Whole Circle, but she's got her's done to a pretty fine art).
We've baked in her wood-fired oven (yummy flat breads) and made pasta and bread. And best of all cultivated with her Fjord horse Thor. As an added bonus, she taught us to spin wool and card weave which is really fun - we're gonna teach some school kids how to do it tomorrow.
So yeah, the view from an organic farm is definitely better than from the I-40. Though there is an awful lot of high-noon irrigating of alfalfa going on around here, and that means big mists thrown into the air when it's 45 degrees in the blazing sun - not too efficient.
So it's real good and Jeff and I are looking forward to incorporating a lot of what we;re learning about into our own farm in the future. Hooray!

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