So it begins.

This post was intended to be published a week ago, but in a moment of technological brilliance, I failed to publish it. So here it is now.

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Yesterday was my first day at Common Thread. The weather was dreary and damp, but it was still exciting to be out in the air, removed from classes and textbooks. Still, I fear I may not be a very good farmer. My first task was to harvest winter squash, acorn and spaghetti squash to be precise. My problem was a problem of color. The ripe spaghetti squash was a pale yellow orange, while the unripe ones still had a green cast. This fine color distinction was lost on me, so I ended up alternating between being too liberal in my judgment of ripeness, picking slightly green ones and being too conservative, leaving ripe squash on the ground. Chris was nice enough to pretend that "they look more yellow now in this light" as he picked the ones I'd passed over. I appreciated that.
Acorn squash were far easier to deal with. If it is a deep, dark green, you pick it. If not, you don't. However, even as the task of deciding which to harvest was easier, the task of finding the squash was much harder. They hid, camouflaged in green, shielded by thick vegetation. So I stomped about, kicking through leaves trying to uncover the fruit. I kind of felt like a wilderness explorer, or maybe a gatherer from pre-agriculture times.

At this point, I have to express my amazement at Chris's ability to catch slippery, muddy squash. To get the squash in an easily to collect row, we would throw it to Chris who would place it by the edge of the patch. I had some truly terrifying wild pitches, but he caught almost everything, seemingly with ease.

Finally, I have to say, I'm tired. Maybe that has a lot to do with my 8.20 class, but still, my legs hurt from dragging big buckets of onions into the green house, and my back is sore from bending to harvest the squash. I think this is going to be a tremendous and challenging experience and I think I will walk away with a great respect for the physical and mental strains of being a farmer. But it has only just begun.