Rivers 'N Grease

Back from a city weekend. Feeling good, feeling light, feeling ready. Ready for work and postings.


Hard rain all day through, our first real weekday washout of the summer. Temperature stuck at 65F.


My brother dropped me off this morning, I had the full regalia: rain slick and the new boots (their trial by fire). Joined up with the foreman, Stretch and Newport out back-- hiding beneath the tattered tarp awning. One quick job: we took hoes and shovels to clear out some drainage trenches around the store/greenhouse/barn. The boss showed up and we got to business.

Enough tomatoes have started coming from the fields that its no longer possible to keep them out behind the store-- from now on, everything goes to the barn basement/workshop/storage. It's an ideal tomato location: the temperature is pretty consistent (60-70F), no rats/vermin (thanks to the 3-4 feral barn cats) and is easily accessible when it comes time for wholesaling. 65 buckets of tomatoes where set in the doorway, we set up and got to shining/sorting. Shining is especially important this year, giving us a chance to wipe off the fungicide alongside the dirt/rotten leaves. (Last year was perfect dry growing, no need for -cides of any type.) So we got shining. Only 3 categories today-- 1sts ripe, 1sts needing to ripen and 2nds. Newport brought a radio down and plugged in his music. The water bucket we used to dampen our wipe clothes went black from the dirt/fungicide/tomato plant remnants. We worked at a frantic pace-- all of us not-so-secretly hoping the boss would send us home early after the job was done. Finished up the shining/sorting in no time.

Next up-- greenhouse cleaning. It was a wet walk up, it was a thick drenching rain. The boss decided no more lettuce this year-- we have too much to worry about with the corn/squash/tomatoes/peppers/everything else. We'll just buy-in what we need for the store/CSA from neighbor farms. So we dumped out all the lettuce seedling trays (they looked badly neglected, someone has habitually forgotten to water them on the weekends). Sorted out all the empty trays and cleared off all the wood palates. Organized all the fertilizers, herb/pesticide containters, tools and tables. We hefted up the palates and stacked them up against the left greenhouse wall. We found some enormous wasp nests (each had 200-300 angry wasps humming). Newport and I got the poison and sprayed them down. Stretch got bit by an angry escapee, so we let him have his vengeance on the remaining nests (2 in the greenhouse frame, 1 in a pick crate and 1 underneath a saw horse). Newport and I lit memorial cigarettes in the wasps' honor. With the floor space cleared, we went around and easily pulled all the weeds growing out of the dirt floor. Raked down the floor and tossed all the mess in the trash. Stretch and I went through all the tools and sorted them based on how frequently they're used-- hoes/rakes up front, grub-hoes and axes in back. Lunch time.


Ate my soggy sandwich on a milk crate in the store with Rhode Island and Jockey. After lunch I helped the boss load all the 2nd tomatoes from the barn into the van, then into the kitchen. Time to make tomato sauce. Newport, Jockey and I got busy: first hand washing every tomato (15 boxes worth), then coring out the stem piece with knives and finally dicing them into kitchen pails (also with knives). We filled 5 big buckets. The boss has a wild machine from yester-year-- 1950's electric tomato de-seeder. Hunks of tomato go in, the skin/seeds/scars/imperfections ooze out one end and a pure tomato pulp drips into a bucket. But Jockey, as kitchen man, handled all that-- Newport and I were on barn duty. We cleaned the barn out head to toe: organized all the cardboard boxes (berry/pumpkin/tomato/shipping/picking/otherwise), stacked the baskets/pint & quart containers/plastic-bag dispensers/field cloth/plastic wrap/styrofoam/ pick crates/rope coils/bushel crates & boxes/olde-time steel pick trays. We organized everything-- fortunately both Newport and I are a bit obsessive compulsive. I climbed into the basement and Newport threw all the big tomato storage trays/the smaller wholesale tomato trays down between the floorboards to me. We stacked 'em up and organized them in the basement/storage room where we shined/sorted earlier. What's next?

Newport and I met the foreman in the greenhouse-- he'd somehow managed to drive tractor completely inside. We cleaned all the windows and cab interior. Newport called it an early day. I stuck around and helped the foreman grease all the tractor's joints. Almost every movable joint in the tractor (front loader/wheels/rear power box) has a tiny steel cap-- which connects to the nozzle of our hand cranked grease gun. So the foreman and I climbed all over the tractor hunting out and greasing joints. Most joints only require 2-3 cranks before grease spills from the seams (our sign that it's well lubricated), but the rear axle enclosure required somewhere around 160 cranks before the grease spilled out. We popped the hood and vacuumed/cleaned out the air filters. Closed up the hood and searched over the entire machine looking for something to do. The foreman climbed on top of the tractor cab, straightened out the radio antenna with a smile and sat down for a cigarette-- all done.

The boss was nowhere to be found and there was nothing to do. It was just the foreman and me left, so we took the shovel/hoe out again to fix up the drain grates/erosion pools lining the boss's brother's garden. With that done, there really was nothing left to do. The boss called and told us to get on home, maybe tomorrow will be dryer. Maybe.


Asides: Whew, feels good to do a full post after the weak thursday/friday efforts of last week. Jimbo definitely kept me guessing with his semi-surprise visit. He certainly gave me a lot to think about. We sat up on the hill top and he ran through a couple of the soil development programs he's been studying. The real problem farms are in right now, as far as developing soil goes, is that almost everyone is depended on petroleum based fertilizers. It's the cheapest, it's the easiest to manage (tons of time/technology devoted to its use), but the coupled rising cost/diminishing supply its future is suspect. The answer is animals. Jimbo worked side-by-side with an agro-pioneer whose developed a systematic method. Here's the basic lowdown: grow grass in a field and portion it into a manageable grid, graze a cow herd on the grass moving them between sections every couple days, 3ish days after the herd has moved on introduce a full coop of chickens into the grid space (it takes 3ish days for maggots/other larvae to hatch inside the cows feces), the chickens break up the manure and shit the grub nutrients back into the soil, (after moving the chickens to the next grid space) plant tubers everywhere (like diakon radishes/etc), when they mature (after months) send in the hogs, the pigs will root up the radish tubers turning/mixing in the green matter/feces/soil with their own excrement essentially doing a passive plowing for you. Through Jimbo and his buddy's experiments they found this method can add an inch of grade A+ top soil a year. For a bit of context-- it took my boss's forefathers a generation of dairy farming for every inch of top soil they got. Amazing. I really hope Jimbo has got something here. A functional topsoil development program free of petroleum products would be huge. Anyway, Jimbo shared many such farming schemes over the course of his visit-- he's changed a lot I might add. He was always a fellow obsessed with ideas, but now he's started to temper his ideas with their application-- and he'll be the first to tell you: where ideals and reality meet, is a bloody disappointing mess. Many great sounding ideas just don't work, others work but ultimately require so much labor and energy they might as well have failed. It was a good visit. And a good kick off to spending a wild weekend with Darlin and friends in the city.

As I said earlier, I'm ready to go-- if it only wasn't for all this damn rain.

Take it easy.