Community Work Day

Every third Sunday of the month, our farm hosts a community work day where people around the farm come and volunteer for a couple of hours. Later in the day, we fire up the wood brick oven and make some pizza.

Since it was raining last weekend, this weekend was the first community work day this summer. I wasn't terribly excited at first. First off, its really hot. I woke up Sunday morning with my entire body covered in clammy sweat while humidity was clogging my lungs. I felt like someone was giving birth to me. Second off, without even trying to pretend that we work as hard as farmers who farm for a living, we work our asses off - Mondays through Fridays, and usually one of the weekends. Maybe I just complain a lot, but the heat combined with the now-repetitive nature of the work we do has made the internship pretty difficult recently.

So after the grueling bike ride up Science Hill, I had already shrunk about three inches due to water loss. There weren't many people at first, so mulching by myself was miserable for a while. But once the volunteers started a-comin', things really started a-runnin'. It was great just seeing so many people at the farm working and enjoying themselves despite the heat...it reinforced my ideas that doing things as a community is immensely enriching and can make any job worthwhile. The importance of community has been a consistent theme this summer.

Later on, about ten kids from a reading tutoring program that I volunteer at came to visit and volunteer. One of them had just seen the movie Wall-E (which I highly recommend - unlike anything I've ever seen before - I remember feelings of pure joy and awe while watching that movie) and was really interested in farming. During tutoring sessions, many of the kids are hard to handle. On the farm, however, their attention spans stretched from five minutes to three hours. They absolutely loved the idea of being able pluck food from one plant, weeding out other plants, and even mulching the beds. I had been bringing a vegetable from the farm every week for the kids to eat as well so it was great having them come and see what food looks like before all the processing and packaging.

Finally, pizza. Best thing ever. The pizzamakers worked hard all day, building the fire, making the dough, etc. Once it came out, the pizza was a celebration of everything we had done that day, which made it taste twice as good (or maybe I was just really hungry). I got out my mandolin and the dude who street-performs by the British Art Center took out his homemade "mando-lute" and we did a nice little jam as the sun went down.

Seriously, someone make a movie!