A while back in May, I signed up for an Alternative Weekend at Clagett Farm. The description was basically advertising a learning experience centered around the issue of food security and to also see what life is like on a farm. Honestly, I signed up because I think farms are really cool and I've always wanted a big vegetable/fruit garden in my backyard. This fact will be important later on.
So on Friday I left work early, drove back home, and then packed and drove back to College Park to meet up with everyone else in the group. Pretty soon after, we were on our way to the farm.
Cute, right? Apparently it was owned by a family called the Clagetts and they were complete assholes (which probably means they owned slaves... at least that's what the guy said), and then they gave the farm to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation after tobacco stopped being profitable and they were losing money. We actually stayed in a church very close to the farm and just drove back and forth during the weekend.
Our lovely group of AW participants. I think in like every group picture we took, Daniel always stood somewhere that wasn't next to me haha. Maybe I smelled bad.
This is Honey! She's one of two dogs that live on the farm and she was following us around all day. Such a sweet dog. Pretty much everyone petted her and played with her and she was loving it. Even Daniel, and he is not a dog person. I think the other one's name was Garlic, but I'm not sure. I think Honey is a really cute name but I don't know about Garlic... haha
The first day (technically the second day because the first day we just arrived at the farm/house and slept, we went to the vegetable fields and picked cucumber, squash, zucchini, and peppers. I think the cucumbers were the most satisfying and fun to pick, because they were practically the same exact color as their vines/leaves so they were really hard to spot at times. So you would see a nice big one and get all excited because no one else had spotted it yet. Or maybe that's just me. I definitely had the most fun in the vegetable patch, because it was exactly the kind of thing I signed up for and was expecting to experience. And to top it all off, we picked something around 687 pounds of produce. That's like fifty pounds per person!
The first day (technically the second day because the first day we just arrived at the farm/house and slept, we went to the vegetable fields and picked cucumber, squash, zucchini, and peppers. I think the cucumbers were the most satisfying and fun to pick, because they were practically the same exact color as their vines/leaves so they were really hard to spot at times. So you would see a nice big one and get all excited because no one else had spotted it yet. Or maybe that's just me. I definitely had the most fun in the vegetable patch, because it was exactly the kind of thing I signed up for and was expecting to experience. And to top it all off, we picked something around 687 pounds of produce. That's like fifty pounds per person!
This is from our truck ride to the pepper field, which about only half of us went to because it wasn't as big of a field. For some reason I thought peppers grew on taller plants so I decided to go pick them because it would be easier, but they grow on small little bushes close to the ground so you have to either sit or squat to pick them. So I guess that's karma for trying to pick the easier task. Squatting became painful after a while so I decided to just get dirty and sit on the ground. I think I got the dirtiest out of everyone on the trip, because I just stopped caring about squatting or kneeling and was like "Eh, I'll just shower later anyway".
This picture really doesn't do the view justice, but off in the distance are Cut-Your-Own Christmas trees. They really grow everything here.
A blurry but adorable picture of Honey sprinting alongside us in the truck, with her tongue flying all over the place. She must be in great shape, because she was running super fast.
Tomatoes and zucchini. We didn't actually pick the tomatoes, I have no idea when those were picked.
Zucchini and squash. Yep, all of those yellow bins were full of veggies.
This is a really beautiful flower garden that was planted right next to the main farm shed. Since Clagett Farm is an organic farm, they try to use as many creative and organic methods as possible for pest control. One method is to plant lots of delicious flowers really close to crops, so that all the bugs will be distracted by those instead of going for the vegetables and fruit. And it definitely seemed to be working, because there weren't many bugs on the crops we just picked, but just by looking at the garden from 20 feet away I could see the swarm of bugs all over it. I never knew about that, so I thought that was pretty cool. And I think the workers will occasionally pick flowers for the CSA members to take home to put in vases.
So what does all of this work have to do with food security? Clagett Farm donates 40% of their produce yield to the Capitol Area Food Bank, which provides healthy food at an affordable price (or for free) to low income families in the DC area. The farm also is a CSA, which means you pay a set price each season to the farm, and you come every weekend to pick up your share of the produce that week. So it's basically subscribing to a farm. The good thing is that you get fresh, local, and organic produce. The bad thing is that you might pay a lot of money and end up getting not such a great amount of produce that season. It's a risk that you take together. I felt like the food bank part was the aspect that really had to do with food security, because I was watching the CSA members come to pick up their food and they were rollin' up in BMWs and big SUVs and other such midrange luxury cars. They definitely didn't look like the type that were suffering from food insecurity, but I guess the farm needs its money from somewhere.
After lunch, we took a truck ride to the watermelon field to do some weeding. You hear "weeding" and you think you're just gonna pull some plants and call it a day, right? Wrong. I mean, yeah, technically right, but wrong in the way that it was much more difficult than I imagined. It was super hot, there was hardly any cloud cover, and there were just so many weeds to pull. I'll admit I was very grumpy by the end of the day. I felt like I was going to pass out multiple times during that, but of course I'm sitting here in my comfortable bed and thinking "I could probably do that again, it wasn't that bad". Nah, it was pretty bad.
See all of that on the right side of the field? Yeah, all of that was weeds, and we had to pick pretty much all of it by hand. Organic farming is exhausting. And I don't even do it as a job! I did it for like eight hours, tops! This weekend seriously opened my eyes to how hard farmers work. They work incredibly hard every day to make a living. Like, I felt super lazy just being around them and watching them work so efficiently. Pretty much everything they do is physically taxing, and to add insult to injury, a lot of the time they're working under the swelteringly hot sun. Hello, skin cancer and back problems.
By around 4:30 PM we were back at the house and cooking dinner. I practically ran downstairs to grab my towel and clothes because I wanted to shower so badly. After dinner, we had a few hours of reflection and went to sleep. While a lot of the things discussed during reflection were insightful, I felt like a lot of it was also extremely repetitive, especially by the last day. I didn't expect it to be so centered around the idea of community service; I expected more of a discussion about food security and agriculture. Like at times, all of the discussion questions reminded me of what it was like to attend church camps in the summer, back when I had some form of religion in my life. Basically a lot of repetition to hammer certain concepts into our heads. But whatever. I couldn't fall asleep until like 2 AM, which was really bad because we had to wake up at 6:30 the next day to eat breakfast and clean the whole house. The fact that I'm literally incapable of falling asleep in a reasonable amount of time in places that AREN'T my bed at home makes me anxious for my semester abroad. I feel like I'm just gonna be a zombie roaming around Europe, chugging caffeine.
The second day.... I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty awful. We were told we were going to be working in the tree nursery to pull weeds around the tree roots, and those trees would eventually be replanted in areas around the Chesapeake Bay watershed to help prevent erosion. However, we didn't actually do that (which is no one's fault, we just have to do whatever the farm wants us to do that day) and we were sent to a barn where we had to unload an entire wagon full of hay (probably like 150 bales, each around 35-40 pounds) and assembly-line it up to the very back corner of the barn so we could stack it all up. It was probably more than 100 degrees in that barn, hay was flying everywhere, there was no ventilation, and it was pretty dark in the way back of the barn. Oh, and there were holes in the hay everywhere so people were falling all over the place. I sound like a total wimp, but it was actually the hardest thing I have done in a while. And it didn't help that there were three guys out of all of us, and girls tend to have weaker upper body strength.
Anyways I'll stop complaining and show you some pictures so you can understand what I'm talking about.
That is the wagon after it was all unloaded. And that's me in the red shirt. If you look closely, I'm probably crying (kidding). You can't even see into the barn, but everyone else was inside it and higher up on top of the hay. See how big those things are?
The aftermath of Haypocalypse 2015. It looks like someone attacked my legs with a tiny whip haha. I made the terrible decision to wear shorts because I'd rather get scratches than sweat to death. My legs are actually fine now so that's a relief. After that, we had lunch, had some more reflection, and drove back to school and then drove back home. Overall, it was a really great experience and I'm really glad I went, because I would have most definitely sat on my butt all weekend if I hadn't.
Never mind, I guess Daniel did stand near me.
Obligatory post-alternative-weekend National Ice Cream Day celebration picture.