Who's Your Farmer?

Jess bought a skateboard off of a 10 yr old kid
(if you want one of these bumper stickers lemme know)

Our 7ft tall boss, Bruce Smith, hoeing potatoes

"Hello irrigation channel"

Planting basil in the hoop house

This is our beautiful farm! (that's me, hoeing peppers)

Western Trails food products (westerntrailsfood.com)

Mostly barley derived foods; barley flour, barley pancake and waffle mix, barley breads...all barley grown in MT. Also, Rustler BBQ sauce is the bomb.

Jess modeling our Farm-to-Table shirts at work

Raspberry crew in Savage, MT
We picked approx 10 lbs that day

As erin winds wildly through the open road of route 16 towards savage, cal and I watch dirt clouding behind us in the rear view mirrors, gripping on to door handles and anything grabbable. Alright, maybe thats a bit dramatic, but it was a little intense. We took off early this morning, out and about by 7:30am headed to savage to pick raspberries. A lady named sue told bruce her raspberry bushes are growing faster than she could pick them, so he sent us to help. Three flats of raspberrys later we are all smiling in a field hyped up on coffee with red stains all over our clothes. We took a mini road trip to sydney when we were done to check out a couple of stores and an agate shop/museum in savage. note: agate is a is a microcrystalline variety of quartz (silica), chiefly chalcedony, characterised by its fineness of grain and brightness of color. They are crazy about them here, finding them, tumbling them, and showing them off. They are in fact beautiful if I do say to myself, and I may just be making a necklace out of one when bruces batch is finished tumbling. It was quite a productive day, and being back at the office in front of the computer I am realizing how exhausted I am. Something huge happened today though. I got a call from our landlord (I've been waiting for this call) and he said I can have a dog! I have been on the phone with the eastern montana humane society waiting to here from my landlord so I can adopt a puppy from them. Not sure exactly which one i'm going to get yet, but something of a black lab/husky or lab/collie mix.... about 1 year old. Its going to be a lot of work and very stressful, tiring, and time consuming but i've been waiting for this for a few years now (a stable/settled lifestyle) so I am ready for it. I didn't tell the landlord about the firepit or the painted walls, but some things its ok to just not mention. The only coffee shop closed at 2pm today and I am literally nodding off. Ohhh, I had my meeting with the dean at dawson community college and a women who is the leader of continuing education at the school yesturday and it went REALLY well. They loved my ideas for a cooking class and want to plan and talk further about getting it up and running. If all goes as planned, by fall I will be teaching a credited semester college class. This is obviously more than I planned to happen by age 22 but hey, i'm ready for anything. The only thing i'm worried about it trying to get a bunch of college kids to listen to a teacher that looks like she could be there little sister. With my fire sign aries attitude, i'm not too concerned though. Well now that i'm back in the office, I should probably get some things done. tonight: mojitos with fresh mint from the garden and celebrating our $145,000 state grant that just went through!!! wooooo community kitchen here I come!

Listening to Jess play my banjo in the kitchen - of course she's never played the banjo before but that doesn't stop her from picking it up and immediately strumming away, clinking plucking dinging in a way I have never been able to even after a year. Some people are just talented.

Monday morning meeting: lasted for over an hour as Bruce, Peggy, Erin, Jess and I gushed ideas and talked about the future and exciting things while we tried to talk about what we were doing for the rest of the week...picking raspberries early tomorrow!

Weeded onions at Alvin's in the morning, the field had been irrigated so at least the weeds were easy to pull up. The onions are in the most serious trouble - last week Bruce said he was just going to "spray em with roundup" and I convinced him to let me weed them instead. Alvin came by and showed me how to set up the irrigation channel for the millet and we moved the irrigation dams and fixed the channels. I like him. a lot. He couldn't help but continue our political gush-session from friday and started in on reagan again

"..aw man, them republicans, they were smart to pick that Reagan, I mean OH BOY he was a poster child"

and then I told him about the Eat-In school lunch campaign I'm going to start (via Josh Viertel, Slow Food because he asked me to and their campaign was missing Montana and he kind of guilted me into it...in the best of ways I'm sure) and Alvin leans over to me and whispers, even though we are in the middle of millet field in the middle of nowhere.."I know who you can talk to on the legislature in town...a little secret, 95% of the courthouse is on OUR side" and he winks. Yes, I really like him.

After lunch I worked on getting together the Eat-In and brainstorming about what it would entail, watered the sweet potatoes at the community garden and weeded the other potatoes and then I started making/painting a huge "welcome" sign for the community garden. It's kind of ugly...yellow and purple...but we have all this free paint in the basement and I just got so excited to use it and and and...

Some exciting things that happened today:

Jess and I got our food stamp cards and we each have about $120 EACH to spend on food a month. omgomgomgomgomomg

I got my health insurance card

I got reimbursed by Americorps AND my first stipend (aka I feel richer than I have in MONTHS)

Jess made me go on a wild goose chase after work today...let's just say we ended up at a pet store/adult entertainment store/head shop in a trailer park. Kind of scary. Definitely smelly.

Peggy, our boss, invited Jess and I to her LAKE HOUSE this friday. omg. We're going. Obviously.

Jess is making fried rice because we were craving chinese food and just couldn't let ourselves do it so we'll see how this vegan version turns out, it'll be no Ollie's but a girl can dream.

Helped run the farmer's market this morning - more vendors than last week but still not many...probably four? Any ideas on how to spice up a farmer's market and make it more exciting? Jess and I are thinking live music...

ran around town doing errands and buying things, exhausted, sunburned (still) sweaty and tired. Going to make mojitos with the mint we picked this morning and carve out a fire pit in the back. We are oober domesticated these days. And now jess wants a puppy....

Note: when working outside all day, wear sunscreen.

I'm an official redneck right now - SO BURNED. Today was long and wonderful. Erin, Tim and I transplanted tomatoes and peppers all morning and then Alvin and Bruce hooked up the irrigation system and turned it on - it was actually a really exciting moment. It's pretty funny to have left the east coast in a rainy cold wet summer to come here to a hot dry and dusty one. The land we are working on has been dry land farmed as long as anyone can remember. That means it's never been irrigated and was probably growing winter wheat or sugar beets. It also means that this is the driest soil I've ever touched and everything immediately dies. When we turned on the water today it was so exhilarating to see our little transplants and crops suddenly swim in water, you could just feel their roots breathing a breath of fresh air and drinking it all up. We dug irrigation channels along our crops for the rest of the afternoon - the potatoes were the longest and took the most amount of time. Jess and I ended up taking off our shoes and running down the potato rows with hoes and digging ditches. Bruce bought us beer and mike's hard lemonade (he drinks it, it's hilarious) because it's friday and it's hot and boring to dig ditches. Because the soil is so dry, nothing lives in it, no worms or creepy crawlies, and also because it's been tilled and farmed for the last 20 years - there's no rocks or animals - so when the water gets in the dirt, we would literally sink almost to our knees between the rows!

I also transplanted basil for me and Jess in the hoop house at the PDC.

At the end of the day we all took off our shoes and drank beer in the irrigation channel. Alvin Hoff came over and invited us back to his place. Jess said it already but...this man is phenomenal. He looks like the farm version of Craig Battle. We hung out with him and toured his gardens for over an hour, got a little drunk on homemade grape wine and talked about Ronald Reagan being the worst president for agriculture. I could have died happy. His wife was also sweet, long blonde hair and off to Kentucky for a family farmers conference with Wendell Berry! Alvin grows way more stuff than he can eat but he won't sell any of it. Instead, he barters it all away. Some homemade brew here, some manual labor there...he asked me to help him with the lambing (they have 250 lambs) this fall (because, as he put it, "women are better with the livestock ya know...") in exchange for some wine and veggies. I obviously agreed.

Jess and I drove back exhausted, sunburned, and completely happy, screaming songs from the oldies station (the only station in Glendive besides Jesus rock) with all the windows open.

life is exactly how it should be.

My teeth are red from homeade rhubarb wine. My skin is the same color, but from the blistering sun. After we left the office we went back to our acres of land at alvins to dig channels and repair the ones that already existed. Cal went back to get the car and I rode back to alvins on his four wheeler with him. Alvin is the first liberal we've met yet, which was a catalyst for an hour long talk of politics. He has a beautiful farm with about 450 acres of land, sheeps, pigs, homeade beer and wine and a heart of gold. He let us pick a weeks supply of greens from his garden, cleaned and bagged it. For the first time in my life I feel like everything is right. It is all exactly how it should be, and it feels so good to be here now.....

Sent on the Now Network� from my Sprint® BlackBerry

I'm sitting on a pile of rocks next to a pile of bricks. The bricks will soon be a community pizza/bread oven. The rocks were taken out of the office garden and then replaced with smaller ones. The weather here is perfect for outdoor lounging which I am indulging in right now. I stayed at the office today and did some paper work while cal went out of alvins and the community garden. Compared to every other day we've been here, today seems to be the most low-key. I'm excited to get some housework done this weekend and maybe some painting! First we're going to go back out to alvins, cal will tell you what they did this afternoon Tonight: relaxing, beers, tv, and beautiful montana!
Sent on the Now Network� from my Sprint® BlackBerry

Our first entry because Jess just got the internet hooked up while I did sun salutations in our living room and sweated like mad in this 98 degree evening heat!

Today we learned how to clean wheat and beans in this giant shaking shifter machine which cleans out all of the husks and rocks and grass from the product and sifts it out. It took about three hours but it was nice to be inside during the afternoon since today was the HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR here in eastern Montana, I believe it got to 101 and what were we doing during the hottest day of the year? Oh, we were hoeing peppers and tomatoes out at Alvin Hoff's place and shoveling rocks into a rock path in our office garden/farm. For those of you who know me, you can imagine how completely drenched I was today. As for Jess, her back is killing her but it didn't stop her from teaching me how to make sushi tonight. We made and ate a ton of sushi (all vegan of course as Jess is a vegan) and will be bringing some to Peggy and Bruce (our bosses) tomorrow (and maybe Tim and Erin if they are lucky).

Bedtime.

C