Learning Highlights
It was wonderful to finally be back at Moon Valley after two intense weeks of travel and recovery. I received a warm welcome back before spending the evening learning how to make pesto with farm owner, Kim. It was a relaxing evening, stripping basil leaves off of their stems, grating parmesan cheese, and juicing a lemon before combining it all in a food processor to blend. Our recipe also substituted walnuts for pine nuts which was exciting, and the end result was absolutely delicious!
Not much had changed since I had been away, but the biggest difference was discovered upon first arriving at the incubator farm again after my return. What was once a few small calendula plants had quadrupled in size, creating the vision of the calendula fields I had originally envisioned for my summer experience at Moon Valley. It was quite stunning, the beautiful sunny orange speckling the entire field brightly. However, it became less stunning as we began our harvest, which took way longer than it ever had before. One row took a person an entire hour to harvest, we weren’t even able to finish after an entire day of work.
I think the heat contributed to making this calendula harvest so unenjoyable, but the limited number of harvest bags didn’t help either. My bag became so full of flowers, I had to drag it along the ground after me, it was unbearable to have it around my shoulders. I eventually rummaged through my car to find some extra grocery bags we could harvest into, but the overflowing harvest bags definitely hindered the amount of work we were able to get done. Luckily, this big initial harvest made every following harvest a lot easier for the week, which prompted the farm managers to change our work schedule to only have two-day weekends instead of three, meaning we get Thursdays off and work on Fridays. A shorter weekend will allow less time for a bunch of calendula flowers to build up, so hopefully next Monday’s harvest will not be as awful as this past one was.
While most of this week was occupied by calendula harvesting, some of my other tasks included more work in the drying room processing mint, and also another comfrey harvest. Harvesting the comfrey this time around proved to be way more enjoyable due to it not being overgrown like last time, it went quickly for me and was actually quite rewarding. While there weren’t too many new things to learn this week, it was very nice to begin to settle back into the same routine, I am quite thankful to be back in the swing of things!
