The Move

Friday morning I woke up at a quarter to six and turned the coffee on first thing.  I love being the first person awake, especially here on the farm where the birds are already singing their songs at the first signs of light.  My thermos of coffee and I drove to the pool and went for a 6:00am swim and sauna.  What a way to begin a day!

By 8:00 I was headed out to the field to plant beans.  We planted a number of pole beans including Rattlesnake, Oregon Giant, and Volga German.
To prepare the rows for planting beans we used hoes to dig a furrow which we then amended with some bone meal (ground up bones...yum) and then raked in.  Next the beans are placed in the furrow about two inches apart by hand.

Make fun of me all you want about this, but I did not know that planting beans meant plainly placing the dried bean in the ground and covering it up.  How delightfully simple!

Cooked up a lunch of comfort food for the Friday work crew, since it was cloudy and overcast, I thought some refried beans and cornbread would be warm and yummy.


After work on Friday the fun really began.

This weekend was so overwhelming and intense as I was finally moving out of the apartment I’ve been living in in Portland for the past (almost) two years.  It is astounding how much stuff one accumulates over time without even trying.  I’m not even a person who gets off on buying tons of crap, and yet I was still overwhelmed with the amount of shit I had to move.  That said, it is all over now!  Not only am I done moving OUT, I am also done moving IN and it feels SO good.  There were a few people who made this weekend possible—you know who you are, thanks for being wonderful friends, I owe you big time.

It feels so good to finally have all my roots down here on the farm, like I can really sink my teeth into this place and this work to make stuff happen.  That said, it is not we the farmers who “make stuff happen”, it is the soil, sun and water that allow things to grow, we simply help all these elements along as best we can.