It was around this time that I think Tina first noticed the benefits of having me around with her. What happened was she was backing up the truck to the trailer to hitch it up and she was off by a couple inches, so I picked up the trailer by the tongue, just enough to inch it over and hold it there while she cranked up the support leg. It is always fun to see the reaction of people when I do things that they consider impossible for themselves, mostly because it is so rare. But for the rest of the day, Tina was bragging to all her friends at market about her new rugby player intern, and also volunteering her "personal mule", as she calls me, out to other people who needed things lifted or moved.
The market experience in and of its self was really fun. I enjoyed pushing the buttons on the scale and ringing up peoples totals. As well as just interacting with some of the people who stopped by. Also there was a french bakery that had a stand just across from us and around 9, Tina grabbed a $20 out of the cash box and sent me over their to get her a chocolate filled croissant, and myself whatever I wanted, I went with a huge blueberry muffin, which was probably the best muffin I have ever had. The people there were so interesting, customers and stand owners alike. However my favorite person I met today was a customer I talked to, he was this big 6'5" dude with really long hair in a purple shirt who out of no where started telling me about how he used to be a cowboy because his whole family was but that he never fit in with the life style of short hair, drinking, chewing tobacco and being a hard ass, he said that he much preferred his weed, and that in his high school he was just about the only one who looked they way I do right now (long hair). He went on to tell me about how just because he didn't fit in with the life style, didn't mean he wasn't a good cowboy, he won 4 national championships for roping cattle, and apparently he was high for all of them! Ha! Imagine that, a giant stoned cowboy with long hair roping cattle at Nationals! Anyhow, he said that he finally left behind all that cowboy macho crap, and came to a place like this where he fit in just fine. The whole story I was just nodding and saying, "Wow!... Oh, wow.. Ha, no kidding!... Wow, that's something!.. " and then he just left! That was the type of people I was meeting all day!
At one point, a woman who was buying onions said to me, "This is the place you have to come to get onions that aren't thisss big!" as she pantomimed holding a pumpkin. I laughed and agreed, but in my head I was thinking about the fact that the onions she was talking about were supermarket onions, most likely pumped with growth hormones by some massive scale agriculture company that knows it gets paid in overall tonnage and volume it produces. So why not make the onions as big as possible? Well because it is just essentially adding water weight to the onion and tomato, and whatever other produce that is produced by "Big Ag", as Tina calls it, while also watering down the flavor, in my opinion anyways. Another aspect of why fruits and veggies have slowly gotten larger over the last 30 years is that people who market them put out this picture perfect image of what an ideal piece of produce looks like, and that raised the expectation of the consumer, you and me, so that when we go shopping if we have a choice between a slightly smaller apple with maybe a little knick on it, we choose the perfectly formed one right next to it. So we have reached this point finally where people no longer are choosing the massive fruits and veggies, either because they realize they are paying extra for more quantity, and less quantity or for some other reason. In truth I have no idea what impetus drove that woman this morning to the market instead of a Dierburgs or Schunucks, or what caused her to seek out the organic, smaller, more bruised onions. All I know is that the paradigm of picture perfect produce is starting to collapse! This was confirmed later that morning when Tina was conversing with costumers about the corn we were selling and she would keep saying, we have worms in it so don't be shocked. That is a reality of growing organically, if you don't use pesticides, you get worms. Some people would be more wary of it, and quickly drop it into their bags as if it was about to bite them, but others! Others would say, "Good! Just the way I like it!" or "Well that's how you know it's good for you ain't it?" or my favorite, "Ya, that's just extra protein, I'm not to worried!" And the defining characterstic of the people who welcomed the worms was the fact that they were almost all over 65 or 70, meaning they were around before advertisements/brain washing campaigns had taken root in my generation. However I'm still grateful for those people that dropped their corn into their bags like it hot, because they were still there, and still buying our food, despite the conditioning they have about worms in their food.
Here is a picture I was able to snap of our spread and sign!
You can't really see in the picture what we were selling but it was all the same produce I have mentioned in earlier posts: corn, tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, sweet yellow onions, sweet and spicy white onions, purple onions, garlic, and of course chickens. You can also see in the picture the scale that I liked to push the buttons on. :)
So that was the market ended at noon, it was fun, and on the way home we got to stop at a goodwill so I could pick up some more long sleeve work shirts. I made the mistake of packing a half a dozen short sleeved shirt which are no good out here unless you want to burn off the first 5 layers of your arm skin, and the only long sleeved shirts I brought were for the anticipated night time freezes that come in November so they are pretty warm. So I got three new, awesome western looking long sleeved work shirts.
By the way, a quick note about today's mid-day heat, most metal surfaces were to hot to touch with bare skin, you had to have gloves on just to open gates, or climb inside the bed of a truck. I think the high was about 111 today, which I know most of you are thinking, "At least its a dry heat, its not that bad." Well it isn't a dry heat, its been at least 50 percent humidity because this is the end of the monsoon season so there's not enough rain or clouds to cool things down, but there's still enough humidity that builds through out the day to make it extraordinarily hot, as well as maybe a 5-10 minute rain shower around 5 or 6 pm, when you don't really need it, but still enjoy it.
On my break after the market, from about 3-4:30 I went outside because I heard a lot of clanking around and guess who it was?? That's right, the goat who likes to climb everything!
And here is Hershey saying hello to the camera
I also was treated to more goats being goats, with a special feature of Arnold and his gobbling as you can see in this video.
And here is a still shot of the beautiful clouds that I panned to during the videos.
The evening chores went super fast! I am getting faster at everything with each day! But after feeding everyone (the hogs, dogs, and turkeys) I had to go do some harvesting, but it was by far my best experience with harvesting, this was largely due to the fact that it was 5:30 and the sun was behind clouds which shower on me every now and then. Other than that it was a fairly normal harvest, I did lemon cucumbers, which are so good I eat them like apples, and okra. I also figured out a really efficient way of harvesting, instead of putting my basket down a couple feet ahead of me, picking all the stuff in that area and putting it into the tote, then picking that back up, I just clipped the tote to my hammer loop with a carabeener and it was just with me the whole way! While I was harvesting, I came across tons of different beautiful bugs and grasshoppers, which I actually have orders to kill on sight from Jim and Tina, but I can't. I think I killed maybe two or three on my first day, but then I decided I can't do it, it just feels wrong. the bugs need food to, and this is their natural habitat. They way someone put it in the Permaculture course I took is that you are really just paying your tithes to your local wildlife! Anyways, I saw this one grasshopper today and it was about 3 inches long, pretty big, but it was the colors of the Arizona licence plates!! It was purple and green and brown all very beautifully blended across its body.
And since I'm on kind of a bug kick right now, I'll just tell one more quick story: I was talking with Jim about the army ants all around their property and if he had ever tried killing them off, and he said that they are pretty much indestructible. They tried once with an organic certified pesticide, but that it only slowed them down for about three weeks and then they were back in full force. He said the reason was that all the nests are actually connected under ground by literally, miles of tunnels. and that if you actually do some how kill the queen of one nest, that they will import a queen from another nest. Then he went on to say that scientists have actually done carbon dating on some seeds found in really big colonies, and for those of you that don't know, carbon dating is the technology used by paleontologists or archaeologists to find out how old bones or fossils are, and its very accurate. Anyways, the carbon dating results on some nests indicates that there are seed shells in nests that are 25,000 years old!!! Which means that in some places there has been an army ant colony in the same spot, for 25,000 years!! I thought all that was fascinating! Sorry for those of you who did not! :)
Oh and in case anyone was wondering, this is the view from my porter poddy around sunset!
Well its about 7:45 and I suppose I'll head to bed now, since i have been up for almost 15 hours already!
No comments:
Post a Comment