2 Weeks on the farm

We are staying on the Northern Light Farm in northern Minnesota near Bemidji. When we arrived, we felt like the farming here was going to be pretty easy. However, it's a lot of work (as mentioned in a previous post).

The first day on the farm was harvest day. Mondays and Thursdays are the harvest days here. Paul provides vegetables for

his CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture). He divides his

produce out for the number of people who participate and each share is given out once a week. On these days, we wake up early (6 am) since everything needs to be delivered by 1. It's nice to be out so early--everything looks fresh and we have

gotten to see the sunrise. We provide lettuce and spicy greens, which need to be washed (and at 6:30 am the water is freezing!), any other vegetables that are ready to be harvested, and an herb. We weigh whatever is to be distributed and divide it up. On our first week, we had snap peas, garlic, chives, celery, lettuce, spicy greens, and Paul made bread (since he felt that it was a pretty small harvest that day).

Now the summer squash and zucchini are ready and we have about 100 pounds each harvest day. Paul says this will continue until the end of the summer. Once the zucchini starts, there's a lot of it.

They have a different way of thinking about food here. Because they grow everything they eat (besides certain staples), it's not "what do we want to make for dinner", it's "what do we have for dinner".

Anyway, the harvest days begin earlier, but we're done by noon and we have the rest of the day free. Other days we are out around 8 am and work until lunch, then after a break we work again until we can't work any more. While harder, these days are good because we really feel like we're being productive.