Farm Work: A Complete List
Digging
We dug holes for Mexican petunias to grow on the ditch near the road. They were in many small pots from the earlier years, and now Nick decided that it’s time to move them. Digging is hard. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to even move a tiny pile of
Digging is hard. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to even move a tiny pile of dirt, because it is usually tightly gripped together by grassroots. It was oddly satisfying to hear the ripping sound of the roots as the tip of my shovel hit on them. Nick would steady the shovel in the dirt then jump onto it with both feet to shove it down the earth. It looked oddly comedic but it wasn’t easy to do. I bumped my knee on the handle a couple of times and I also had trouble balancing… so much for 12 years of ballet!
After doing the digging myself, I developed respect for the gravediggers. It’s not an easy job. They really do earn their keep.
De-Bugging More information here: 10 weird chicken facts
(PC: Nick)
Hoeing
Hoeing is a funny word because you always have to double-check what it means. Nick once had a foreign volunteer who confused its meanings. One day, Nick told him to get a hoe. After 20 minutes or so, he came back empty-handed, saying, “Nick, there’s no women around here.” Nick said, “Why do you need women?” The volunteer said, “You told me to get a hoe.”
Well, apparently, our farm hoeing consists of breaking out new land and banking the rows of plants. My shoulders are still sore from it…
Moving
I moved Mexican petunias and fallen branches to the burn pile with a wheelbarrow. It was so funny to hear Nick pronounce “wheelbarrow.” “Get your wheelbarrrr,” he says. Nick took up his big scissors one day and cut down some low branches on the trees. Some of the small ones fit into the wheelbarrow perfectly while I had to drag the big ones by hand. I felt like a boss zombie in residence evil when I’m dragging the branches across the farm.
Picking
Picking
Picking is probably my favorite part of farm work, because it feels like the time of
harvest, of reward and of relaxation. I picked green beans, squashes, Malabar spinach, sweet potato leaves, and amaranth to cook. I also picked out the blueberry sprouts in blueberry bushes to keep the bushes low and bushy, so it’ll be easier to pick when the time comes. The blueberries are technically still “greenish-berries” now since they are not yet ripe. My favorite plants to pick are strawberries and asparaguses. The strawberries can be harvested twice a day, and we can simply pluck the strawberries off the stem the pop them into our mouths. Mm, mmm, mmmm. Yum. I usually wash them first so I can discover any possible wormholes – holes made by worms – so I don’t intake more protein than I expect to take. The asparaguses also grow really fast and can be eaten right off the plant. Blueberries
(PC: Nick)
Scrubbing
Someone found an old, rusty pitchfork by the burn pile and I scrubbed it with a metal brush. The metals clanked as they brushed against each other like music. My hands were all rusty after that. Rusty, rusty, rusty…
Sweeping During one of our rainy day day offs, we swept the house a little bit. Not much to say about that.
Another quite therapeutic but potentially hazardous job was sweeping the chicken yard. Once you set into the sweeping motion, your body can simply go on autopilot and your mind is free to do whatever it wants to. However, the dust that the broom sends flying can also be deadly if sucked into the lungs…
(PC: Nick)
Shoveling
This was a once and over job. I shoveled the compost with Maria one afternoon. The compost pile was falling out of its wall, so we needed to pile it back up. My mind also went on autopilot after a while… until my pitchfork stabbed up a white, slimy, gooey thingy that wouldn’t come off.
It was a worm. I destroyed its body and natural habitat. Now it’s haunting my pitchfork because it has nowhere else to go.
Eww.
Stringing
Nick keeps calling these beans Chinese noodle beans, but I can’t remember ever seeing these thin, long, noodle-like beans in China. Overhead, there are several white strings flying from one side of the field to the other. I am to find the long stems of the bean and twirl them along the strings so that they won’t run in the dirt and rot. Nick says some of these stems could go up to a meter.
I did the same for the tomatoes.
Watering
More information here: Watering the chickens
Weeding
Asides from feeding the chickens with weeds/unnecessary grass, I also pull out weeds from the flowerbeds and the field. For the fields – my least favorite job next to de-bugging – we would go alongside each row and spot tiny greens that are out of place. There is also a fire ant nest somewhere hidden in the rows that calls for stepping on. For the flowerbeds, I (PC: Nick)
would grab a short-handled hoe and go
along the side of the beds. I wasn’t thorough enough the first time I did it, and Nick found several more strands of weeds after I thought I had finished.
“Lose face, huh?” Nick said to me, directly translating from the Chinese phrase.
I wasn’t even thinking of it until he brought it up! But well, that’s the cons of having a host who knows so much about China.
(PC: Nick)
Taking pictures!
I thought this was my job for a while. One day, after finishing my usual watering and weeding, I asked Nick for something else to do. He told me to grab his camera and take some pictures.
I probably took a million in 10 minutes. That’s called dedication to the job.
Trimming
Echo and I were trimming two bushes. She piled her branches neatly in a pile while I tossed them everywhere just as Nick showed me. When Nick came over, he looked longly at our trimmed bushes, Echo’s pile, and my lack of it, and said, “Chinese, American.” Lol…
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