November
November 1, 2009
I would like to dedicate this month’s journal to all the people who have helped us on the farm all year and during our Fall Festival.
Wayne has been a loyal employee for a few years now. He does most of the tractor work on the farm, keeps our equipment running and is continually patching and re-patching tires that we should just replace. Every October he willingly transforms to the hayride man and totes endless pumpkin pickers around the fields for hours every day. He recently endured triple by-pass surgery but insisted that he come back to work three weeks later.
I marveled daily this year as to why Ryan and Tamara kept making the drive from Tucson to the farm, week after week to harvest, seed and cultivate. The work is hard and the pay not great, but they always arrived with a smile (and, often a 6-pack for the end of the day). In the spring, due to a miscommunication, Ryan planted about ten times as many radishes as we needed. It is a mistake that we will never let him live down – he became a good-natured target for teasing. I told him that he was responsible for promoting our first ever “Radish Festival” and needed to find a way to get our costumers to buy radishes in bulk. We refer to Ryan now as the Radish Farmer and defer all radish inquiries to him.
The onion and garlic harvest at the beginning of June must have taken its toll on these loyal workers. I know I got tired of the job. Mountains of alliums kept coming in from the fields for us to trim, sort, weigh, bag, pack and braid! Desarae and Jesse were out of school by then and worked along side us. Desarae, being 15 was really a major contributor to the effort this year. I could see that she was aware of the pace that I set and would try to match it. She would watch me out of the corner of her eye as I quickly sewed up burlap sacks of onions or cut three heads of garlic at once and she challenged herself to do the same. Her brother, on the other hand, spent more time telling jokes and playing pranks on Ryan than anything else… Still, with now 7 (or, perhaps, 6 ½) of us at work, the piles of onions and garlic were getting the best of us. We all had blisters on our hands and reeked of garlic!
Thankfully, we were able to recruit a couple of volunteers who seemed to enjoy pitching in. To those of us who had been doing this work day in and day out, the thought of processing onions and garlic for fun seemed ridiculous, but we spent no time trying to convince Diane, her son Jett, Brittany and Nancy that they were crazy. We are so grateful for their help!
This past September I was very nervous about getting the farm ready for the festival. Building the hay-bale maze, setting up lights and the dining tent, repairing fences – the “to-do” list for this month-long event is daunting. To the rescue came our friends and family. “Dinosaur Tom” and his buddy Joey spent two days here shuffling straw bales around to make a maze for kids and a straw-bale pyramid. Tom, an artist who constructs dinosaurs for parks across the country, had strong opinions on the best configurations of the straw bales. Stewart’s brother Morgan brought a crew to help put together the dining tent and place picnic tables around the farm. Scott and Selene Bell, who, along with their kids, have become our October “kitchen crew”, came in September to clean out the packing shed and convert it to the kitchen for the Garden Grill. They emptied out the whole space and scrubbed it from top to bottom to serve up hundreds of farm-raised burgers throughout October.
My sister Kristin gets down right giddy in October – she loves helping out! She moves in on the weekends and keeps track of the financial side of the event as well as anything else we need – and has declared October on the farm her “summer camp”. My mom has the tedious task of rolling out pie dough for pumpkin pies and helps run the store while my stepfather has joined Wayne in the pumpkin patch driving they hay wagon. My Dad gave up his fall break from teaching and flew out to lend a hand. He can do anything from teaching kindergarten kids about farming, to driving a tractor, to repairing a fence. My nieces, ages 11 and 8 ran Snack Shack during the festival!
Aside from the kitchen crew, my sister-in-law, Alex and daughter Desarae have the hardest job on the farm in October. They manage the pony rides. Alex insists that next year we need to harness the energy from the pony turn-style going around and around and run the electricity with it! They estimate that they walk ten miles a day in a twelve-foot circle but they do it with smiles and energy and a love of children and horses!
Thanks to our former high-school teacher, Steve for building the onion boxes, to Jesse for finally coming through and doing a good job at the petting zoo, to Nadine for filling in at the pony rides, to Diane and Jett, for selling pumpkins at the lonely outpost. Thanks to Russ, Rudy, Matt, Torey, Travis, Nan, John, Holden, Sean, Erin, Jen, Luis, Gloria and, of course, to Stewart’s Mom, Regina for maintaining such the beautiful, peaceful farm then allowing us to convert it to a bustling festival every year. Most importantly, thanks to the community for coming out and enjoying a day on the farm! Hope you had as much fun as we did!
We will resume normal Farm Store hours this month – Saturdays 9-3, Sundays 12-3. www.AguaLindaFarm.net
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