(another piece written for the newsletter)
We pride ourselves on working only in the daylight. Most of the time. What I mean is, when we hear about other
farmer friends who work with headlamps, or who are cleaning grain at midnight
when the humidity is the least troublesome, we shake our heads and feel glad
that we don’t have that life.
But, of course, sometimes we do. There were the supremely memorable nights in
our childhood when our parents shook us awake to go outside to cover tomato
plants a few hours before dawn, just before the dew froze on the leaves. Not just a few plants, but a whole field,
thousands of plants. In those days there
were wax paper “hot caps” to cover individual plants, one at a time. There was a bell-shaped metal implement that
had a handle, and you placed it carefully on the hot cap so that the edges
stuck out all around the bottom. Then
the adult would dump a couple of shovelfuls of dirt over the metal bell, the
child would lift it up and move on to the next hot cap. I always remember (not just on occasions like
these) thinking that I was the only kid in my whole third grade class who was doing
this.
And, nowadays, it is quite dark before 6 AM when we meet to
load the market trucks. So we have to
turn on the lights. That certainly
counts as working in the dark.
Some evenings in September, I have to turn on the lights to
finish packing the CSA tomatoes. It just
gets too dark to be able to tell a pink tomato from a red one, and I really
have to be able to see every bit of the tomato in order to let it go into a CSA
bag.
In mid July, when we were trying to avoid the hammering heat
of the day, we started transplanting the kale and broccoli and cauliflower in
the early evening. Ashley and I sat side by side on the transplanter, placing
her precious seedlings into their individual puddles behind the water wheel.
Jon was driving the tractor, keeping the rows straight, saying nothing about
the growing darkness. One night we
pushed on for as long as we could, and the moon was high when we stopped. Ashley said, “pretty soon the bats will be
out.” And we were amused at the thought,
not appalled.
Just tonight I discovered that the streetlights along Beulah
Road can be helpful to a farmer in the suburbs.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t ever have been on a tractor after dark, but I was
feeling behind schedule and pressured by the possibility of a rainy
weekend. I had already spread the soil
amendments on the field and it is wasteful to let that wash away in the
rain. So I started spading at 7:15, just
as the sun was starting to go below the trees over Maymont. It got dark pretty fast, but there is so
much ambient light in the suburbs that I could still see the ground. And I know that field like the back of my
hand, truly. I kept going. And then the moon came up, bright, and there
were shadows. I could have kept going
but my rational husband came to get me, so I reluctantly got off the tractor –
finally understanding what my farmer friends who work in the dark are thinking
when they put on their headlamps.
We still haven’t installed all the lights in the new barn in
Loudoun because we believe in our hearts that we should not be washing
vegetables in the night. But sometimes
on a dark, rainy day we wonder if we should just go ahead and put in a few
lamps. A couple lights over the sinks
might be a good idea, especially in November when daylight is so rare. Anything to avoid headlamps…
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