Fair

The country fair was in town this week! If felt a lot like the Sandwich fair. Paul took us and the other two wwoofers who were around for the week to see the animals and 4H-type stuff. I feel like I appreciated the cows, goats, and chickens a lot more because of our recent experiences with them. There were some cute baby goats and some crazy looking chickens!

Paul and Becky also entered in 5 or 6 of their canned goods. They won first price for most of them and I guess it's a $3 prize for first place! How do they judge the canned goods? Is it like baked goods which they taste? No, they judge purely on looks.... yup, how do your canned goods look?

Anyway, it was really cool. We also tried deep fried cheese curds. I guess cheese curds are a pretty common dish in this area. Fried, they tasted a lot like mozzarella sticks. So yummy. The other wwoofers were from North Carolina, and at their fairs they have fried foods such as fried

snickers bars! None of those here, but it does sound like something I'd like to experience one day.

Pramod and Li are going to go back to the fair tomorrow to see the demolition derby... sounds fun I guess.

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.

Calendar

Click to see a larger image

Egg Hunts

Easter egg hunts are weird... why do people send children out to find easter eggs?

There are about 50 chickens on this farm, and feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs is a quick, easy daily chore. I've gone out to collect eggs twice now, and they have their

usual laying spots, but there aren't always eggs in the same locations. Out of that many chickens, there are only about 5-10 eggs out there every day. It really is an Easter egg hunt and I go out really wanting to find them all. It's exciting to find one!

Hard Gardening

Today, Pramod and I had a hard day of gardening... and all we really did was prepare 4 beds to transplant lettuce plants and plant seeds.

It's amazing how much work goes into preparing a bed. At home, we just pull out the weeds around the planting spot, dig a hole, and put the plant in. Here everything is on a much larger scale. The 4 beds were all about 1.5 feet by 30 feet and they had all been worked over before. First, Pramod went through with a "broad fork", which was a pretty cool tool. It basically pulled everything out from the roots. Before using the broad fork, Paul had gone over all of these plots with a machine that does the same job but not as thoroughly. (I have a picture of Pramod doing that to a different plot at a later date.) While Pramod used the broad fork, I went along after him and pulled out the clumps of weeds and roots. Then we had to add fertilizer (2 year old horse manure)--which first had to be de-grassed and dug up. Pramod then went through with the broad fork again to mix it up while I pulled out the clumps of weeds that were just added with the fertilizer. Afterwards, we fluffed up the dirt with the rake and smoothed it out so that the seeder could go over it easily and smoothly. At this point, the dirt was fluffy enough that you could stick your hand straight into it up to your wrist. In the bed that we planted the lettuce, we added an irrigation hose under the dirt, and that's pretty cool. It's kind of cool to know how to do that. All of that took a lot of hard work, sweat, and about 6 hours of our time.

We also put in a permanent fence for the cows. This involves stringing a lot of wire and pushing a bunch of poles into the ground. Paul's working on getting an intensive grazing rotation for his cows, and so we have a lot more fences to get up.

I don't know how Paul does all this gardening by himself, it's more than a full time job. He has said that he could use another full time worker plus the WWOOFers who come in to make it more manageable.

Northern Light Farm

Minneapolis

Minneapolis was so much fun! We spent a whole week on that part of our journey (whether actually in the city or with our friends from the city at a lake house up north). Dad came to spend some time with us--yes, it'd only been 3 weeks away from home and we already had him come visit. Mom will be in Montana in just over a month too, and I like it!

It was a 5 hour drive from the southern farm to Larry's lake house. Dad's friends from college, Larry and An

dy and Larry's son, Ben and Dad were

all there waiting for us. Andy, Dad, Pramod and I all went/tried to water ski--dad was the only one able to do it, and tubing. It was Pramod and my first time doing either and we both loved the tubing.

We all stayed at Larry's house in Minneapolis--Larry was a great host and we really appreciate him taking us in and we enjoyed his company! On our first day in the city, we rented bicycles--which is a really great way to get around and see the city. On that day we saw a sculpture garden, we went to the top of some really tall building, we had a picnic lunch by the Mississippi, and saw some other views from a theater.... sorry, when Dad's around then he's the one who knows what we're doing and I don't pay much attention to the names of things or places. Dad left the next morning, but he was there long enough for us to enjoy his company and for him to get us settled in this place where he once lived.

Pramod and I saw the Mall of America which is HUGE. Besides being so big, there are a bunch of cool things in the mall besides the usual clothing and accessory shops. Of course, there are the rides in the middle of the mall, there was a Lego station which had giant Lego figures, there was a store called MagiQuest, which I just googled and found is an online action game. I'm not quite sure what was going on, but it seemed like there were little quests and the people who worked there were all dressed up and acted in character--which as some of you may know, I'm kind of into. There were a couple of board game shops that carry the latest board games (ex. Settlers of Catan and Agricola), a hobby shop that we saw with RC airplanes and cars, and there was even an old-timey photo shop with costumes to dress in for the pictures. I kind of wish that Pramod and I had taken one, but we'd already spent a shocking amount of money on our trip so far, so we're not going for any frill at least for a while. I'm sure that some day we'll do it if we really want to.

The last day that we were in the city, we rented a kayak and went around Lake Calhoun, Lake of the Isles, and that last one that is also connected. t was so beautiful and nice. I love the fact that Minneapolis is a city and

there are lakes all over the place

That night we had dinner with Lotte-a friend of ours who has lived in CA, just moved to Minneapolis, but we know her from the last time I was in India (2 years ago now!). We also met her husband, Trac. It was really great to see them!

Sadly, we didn't see Jonathan GH. :( Sorry Jonathan! I was a flake and we never made it happen...

So that's our detailed trip of Minneapolis.