Week 16: Happy Full Moon Week
Tian Tian Farm Newsletter - September 19, 2024
Logistics
We have 31 RSVP’d for CSA day on Saturday, September 28, including family and friends. Wow! Look out for an email this week with ferry details and a brief itinerary.
Also, after today, we’ll only have four more shares of the regular CSA season + one for those we owe a make-up box to. I’ll be checking in the coming weeks with those on the make-up list just to make sure we’re up-to-date.
This Week’s Share:
Komatsuna
Turnips
Fennel
Kale
Eggplant
Slicing tomato
Sun golds
Red onion
The fennel this week comes courtesy of a volunteer crop. Some of them will be on the thin side, but we hope it’s enough to add a little pop to whatever you’re cooking up this week.
We pulled up some of our eggplant plants this week to make space for cover crop, so you’ll be getting more than usual.
Stretching
Farming is hard on the body. Any given day, we work just about every muscle you can imagine. We shovel compost, leveraging our body against the earth as we dig, lift, and wheel 50 gallons of black gold at a time across hundreds of feet. We squat or kneel for hours, pulling weeds and carrots out of the ground or plugging transplants into the ground. We bend to harvest a head of cabbage and twist to place it in a tote and repeat that process 80 times. We lift and set down totes filled with 20 pounds of vegetables (make that 60 pounds if it’s cucumbers) over and over. We drag 50-foot-by-50-foot tarps, weighed down by puddles of water, across the the land.
It was during one of these tarp pulls a couple weeks back that Elizabeth pulled a back muscle, putting her out of commission for most work and all heavy lifting. Thankfully, she’s all but recovered. I’ve done the same lifting one too many bags of rocks at a time. Last year, there were a few memorable weeks where I couldn’t lift my arms above my head.
All this is to say that we need to stretch more. I often bend backwards and roll my neck whenever I find myself standing idle. And Elizabeth will sometimes book us massages at one of those places where a Chinese guy digs his elbow into your back until you’re brought to tears. But we have not developed a daily stretching routine. Every once in a while we’ll follow along a “10 minute morning stretch” on YouTube and say, wow, that felt good, we need to do this every morning, and then forget about it the next day.
We might share this totally unhealthy martyr complex I find among some farmers that views the body as a necessary sacrifice for the agrarian lifestyle. It’s a bad tendency, and not something to be promoted or romanticized. So I’m gonna go stretch now.
‘Til next week,
Steven