Harvest Day Again! We harvested boatload of things this week: garlic scapes, carrots, head lettuce, mesclun mix and red bok choy. Most of the morning is tied up with harvesting. In addition to the CSA shares, we also harvest for wholesale customers, usually chefs in the city. Spinach was a big wholesale order this week.

Lily and Kristen with the red bok choy harvest.

I learned how to spin the twice-washed spinach…in a washing machine relegated solely to this duty. Matt explained the ropes to me and then I got started placing the spinach into large mesh bags, placing two at a time in the machine and then spinning for several minutes.

They came out so much lighter. I was a bit concerned about being so rough with the spinach but Matt explained that 99% of the produce is just fine, there is always some carnage in the process.

The afternoon field walk was to visit the goats. They have been “lent” to the farm to eat a poison ivy patch. These four wethers are sweet enough and I volunteered to do some goat shepherding in the afternoon. This required donning large coveralls (protection from the ivy) and creating a tether line that we connected to the goats’ collars.

We selected the two most docile goats first, leaving Colby and Freckles, the more rambunctious goats, in the pen for the second shift. Putting the “she” in shepherding, Meredith’s term was a likeable activity. Goats are much more like cows than sheep…with dog-like qualities as well in the ways that they observe us.