Life on the Farm

We have always thought that everyone should spend some part of their working, adult life in food service.  As a waiter, host(ess), bartender, back line-cook, you simultaneously get to experience the best and worst that American society can (pardon the pun) dish out.  You can learn volumes in one week about our society, how people respond to “the help,” and, if you pay attention, how disconnected our society is from the production of the very thing that sustains it.  After spending 2 weeks working at Rippling Waters Organic Farm in Standish, ME, we’d like to add farm work to the list of job experiences everyone should have. 

Rippling Waters grows just about every vegetable imaginable, including 7 different types of kale and 4 different types of chard.  Who knew?  These whole-food oriented vegetarians were pretty darn happy as farm fresh food comes free (say that 10 times fast) with your hard work.

Without meaning to sound too proud, we are no slouches when it comes to hard physical work.  And while we knew that this farm was very involved in their community and quite ambitious before we arrived (4 weekly farmer’s markets, 100 CSA families, food pantries, school gardens, and farm store) we were still impressed by the load of work that this place did on only 3ish acres.   We were also impressed by how worn out we were at the end of the day -- and after the first 6 days there, we were pretty shattered.  The farm has very recently switched over to a “no till” method which means that everything takes about 10x as long to prepare for the season, but it saves time in weeding during the growing season.  Truckload after truckload of local folks seeking a good place to donate their fallen leaves arrived at the farm and provided us with the free materials we needed to accomplish this work.
 

To quote one of the farms’ employees, “after working here, I’m convinced that all you need to start a farm is a few hand tools and a Vermont Cart.”  The cart is what we used to haul everything from leaves to weeds to tools to dried chicken poop.  They were in various states of repair, but we got to know them very well.  Is it too much of a cliché to say that after the first week we began to feel our bodies transform from the experience, to admire the way the healthy eating, hard work, and daybreak to dusk workday was treating us?  I hope not, because it certainly felt true. 

After our own adventure of trying to locate the farm which involved 2 wi-fi locations, 1 set of personal directions, Googlemaps and our first night of staying in a Walmart parking lot (aka Camp Wally), we arrived to the farm on their day off.  Eager to help, we decided to stick it out and see what would happen in the morning.  Sure enough, we woke up and found Julee the farm manager and got started with mulching -- a verb we would become well-connected with over the next 15 days.  In that time we got involved in nearly every aspect the farm had going from day-to-day maintenance and special projects to annual housekeeping and “closing down for the season” type tasks.  We even got to wear our educator hats for a day when a school group arrived to do their annual service-learning project. 

Here are just a few of the things we did while there:
Harvested late fall veggies, (kale, chard, potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, collards, celeriac, salad greens…)
Weed, mulch, repeat
Rake raised beds, mulch, repeat
Dig potatoes, weed, mulch, repeat
Sort seed inventory, mulch, repeat
Compost, weed, mulch, repeat
Build new raised beds for root vegetables, layer like lasagna (seaweed, soil/compost, amendments, leaves, hay)
Hugelkultur (this is a really cool way of building raised planting mounds built of soil and decomposing logs – the logs act as a water and nutrient battery in the soil so the plants don’t require watering)

We think we learned more about permaculture methods in 2 weeks than we have in the last 5 years.  It’s amazing what experiential education will do for both the mind and the body!  We will definitely continue WWOOFing as we travel across the U.S.  as we were more than inspired by the folks we met. We have hope that our food production systems **may** be beginning to change with this new generation of young people getting involved in farm work -- hats off to Molly (and her adorable dog, Finley), Stowe, Marina, Brenna Mae, and Brandon…as well as their fearless leaders, Julee and Richard!