June 13, 2009 - Week 3

The first assignment today was harvesting the kohlrabi. I didn't even know this vegetable existed. It looks like an alien pod after it is pulled from the earth, and it has stalks that come up from the sides like tiny celery. The stalks and base are cut, and what is remaining is a cream colored pod-thing with finger-like stalks from the sides. I am sure that people have eaten this all over the world...just not me. . I am so impressed at the amount of variety that is grown here. Next we started to weed the onions and then switched over to carrots. The weeds were more abundant than the carrots so this task was very delicate. I must admit I hacked a few of the seedlings as I was using the hand weeder. Erin and I weeded the three rows the whole way (about 175 ft). We finished by weeding the beets by hand like the carrots. Then she introduced the concept of thinning right as I was recovering from losing about 4 carrot seedlings. Now I had to purposely the remove the overcrowded plants! This created a stumbling block for me because I was unsure of pulling the "right" (or in this case, the "worst") beet sprout from the ground. Of course it is necessary to thin the plants to maximize one plant's "fruit" but I imagined a potential beet on the end of each plant that now can never be. Erin, on the other hand, was quite quick to thin the rows. I guess this is all in the day's work for a farmer.