First Day!

My first day of the internship was great!  Tuesday morning is set aside for tending the compost and the weekly planning meeting.  I arrived at the compost piles at 7 AM in my Wellies, ready for action.  Shortly thereafter, I was handed a shovel and told to help add the layer of well-rotted manure to the pile of refuse collected from the kitchens of the school, restaurant, and food co-op that are also part of the Threefold Education Center.  The manure layer comes after a sprinkling of lime is added to raise the pH.  After building up the pile and adding a layer of old wet leaves to give it a "skin", we headed into the cabin near the garden that's used for class time and projects like making herbal teas.

It was Intern John's last day, so we had a rhubarb-apple crisp (made with rhubarb from the garden) and other treats.  John is my age and was living in Manhattan before the internship, so it was a similar lifestyle change for him.  He's not actually leaving; he's going up the hill to the Fellowship Community, which is an intergenerational community with a focus on caring for the elderly.  There is also a farm there.

A group of early elementary students arrived for a field trip later in the morning.  They were kept busy with collecting dandelion heads (used for a preparation that's added to the compost) and filling pots with the potting soil the interns had made.  Internship Director Mac Mead is planning to sell 16-pund bags of  the potting soil at the co-op and during the plant sale, so he challenged us to come up with a catchy name: the winner was Garden Gold.  We used the pots of soil to transplant several hundred tomato seedlings.  Some will be planted in the garden later while others will be sold at the big plant sale coming up in a few weeks.  Since most of the tomatoes are heirloom varieties, most of their names were new to me: Pruden's Purple, Chadwick's Cherry, Black Cherry, Golden Delight, Mayona, Green Zebra and others.

After the hour and a half lunch break, I was wandering around the tiny orchard of peach, apple, and pear trees and I tripped on a garter snake that was crossing my path in the grass.  Something about this really brought home the fact that I'm not working in an office anymore and made me laugh.  The snake just looked annoyed.

Based on the celestial calendar used for planting here, today was a root day.  This meant that the afternoon was spent cultivating the soil around the leeks and onions in the upper field in order to reduce weeds and increase water absorption.  We called it a day around 4:30 PM.

Tomorrow is a flower day, so we'll be harvesting more dandelion heads in the late morning.  The work day will begin with mucking out the horses' pen and grooming them.  More on that later.