Cherries, some Planting and Weeding

Today at 6:40 in the morning I was standing on a stepladder harvesting cherries.
{The picture is from this evening though, 11 hours later}
The air was crisp and moist, the sun’s glare still cool, the highway humming with morning commuters, and Sarah-from-Hamburg and I were told by Ann “harvest for 45 minutes only, just the reddest berries.

“ It was my first time this season harvesting tree fruits at simpler thyme, and it was a welcome change from harvesting greens, roots, shoots, leaves and stems, etc. Only harvesting berries compares to harvesting tree fruits:



experientially, taking food from a woody perennial plant feels so much more interesting to me; because of how much less work that food took to produce; because the plant is “old” and rooted, not just something that was germinated between February and last week.


We harvested about 11L of cherries,

and then moved onto a weeding job in the tomato section of the market garden, a long rectangular section of tomatoes interplanted with basil.


{3} For the brunt of the morning we switched back and forth between this weeding job, and transplanting cabbage seedlings in the brassica section of the market garden. Bill gave us a few flats worth of seedlings dug up from the brassica nursery beds, and we planted the 1-3 inch tall babies four-wide on the raised beds, spaced 6-9 inches apart. {4}


Wrapped up the main field work of the day with weeding an edge to be planted with herbs or flowers in days to come,{5} and then a half an hour of weeding in peppers in the evening.



What was really neat about today was returning to places I helped plant a little over a month ago: my first and second weeks here, we put thousands of nightshade (tomato, pepper, eggplant, tomatillo) seedlings in the ground. Many/most of these beds have apparently been weeded three or four times over the past 6-ish weeks according to Ann: I had thought “this area has only been weeded once or twice since planting” since I have only personally worked in these sections of the garden sparsely since planting. So, that just shows how much one person, one intern, on a farm with many workers, can miss; how much one can not notice.