In general, we work five days a week, but usually only three days at Flo's garden. The reason Flo brought us in as volunteers in the first place is because he's got a head full of ideas that he wants to actualize since moving into his house in January. Some of it is pretty basic, like turning his ragtag gang of vegetable and herb beds into a proper garden, which will provide produce for his house and his falafel stand. He's got a polytunnel as well, which we've been filling to its maximum capacity so that Flo can add an enormous lettuce battalion to his "Gourmet Offensive." Ideally, we'll be creating a permaculture, where the placement and variety of what is grown works to benefit the greater good of the garden, like stacking plants on top of each other for efficient use of water runoff, or growing nitrogen fixing plants next to nitrogen users.
I've also been recruited for the odd household task such as cleaning out the old rainwater catchment tank that came with the house and had a thick murky layer of sludge on the floor that needed scooping-out with a dustpan. One of my proudest accomplishments was when Flo told me he needed to prepare tapas for a wedding that he was catering, while also filling a bakery order for 15 bags of 50 falafel balls each. In one Friday, over around 6 or 7 hours, I rolled, fried and bagged nearly 800 falafel balls, while enjoying the company of constantly skipping CDs and an anxious, angry, and foul-mouthed Dutch-Irish chef. It was a good day, until Flo admitted that if I wanted to work in his falafel stand someday, I'd have to make that same number of balls in about a third the amount of time with a broken deep-fryer, and my dreams were shattered, just like that.
We've also been working at a larger-scale organic farm, Green Earth Organics, run by Flo's friend Kenneth. Over there, we've been doing fieldwork more typical of a big commercial operation than what Flo has. Lots of weeding, sowing, more weeding, other sowing, sandbag-filling, more weeding and sowing, and soon, when the sun has come out long enough to let the plants grow to fruit (which takes a while under the fluffy, gray skies of Ireland), harvesting. Kenneth has acres and acres of fields and a half dozen polytunnels where he grows all manner of vegetables and herbs. Fruit and more specialty items are imported, and then he sells it all to try to make a living, using the same land that has been farmed by his family for three generations.
Since most of my farming experience comes from weeding my Mom's tiny garden bed in the backyard 10-15 years ago, and then going to Mali and working with my neighbors in their fields before starting my own plot of corn, I am accustomed to pretty low-tech agricultural methods. Organic farming, despite being closer to a natural way of agriculture, can't be sustainably done without tractors, fertilizer sprayers, and the tools of industry. The thing is, while I knew in my head that there are tools and machines for everything, I didn't know that this was literally true until now. To illustrate, when I was in Mali, people would often talk to me about Malian farmers versus American farmers.
"In America, they have machines to do everything!" they would say. "Do they have machines that plant the seeds too? And machines that tie up the sacks of rice for you? And that roll up the bales of straw?" I would tell them yes, assuming that it was true, but never having actually seen any of these things for myself. Then I came to Kenneth's farm, and I realized that there is, literally, a machine for everything. There's a machine you put on the back of a tractor, and you just sit on a stool, feed the machinery seeds or saplings, and it will plant them in perfect rows with even spacing. There's a tool that will grab wire ties and with a couple yanks, twist the wire up to close up the burlap sacks of potatoes, or sand or whatever. And there's a machine that also goes on the back of a tractor that cuts grass, rolls it up into massive bales, tightly wraps it in plastic to keep out mold, and deposits it upright on the ground, while you just keep your foot on the accelerator. I saw these things in action, and all I could think was "Damn, my Malian buddies would be jealous!" Of course, I have to admit that I miss my daba, a small, cubit-length scooping hoe used by Malian villagers for weeding, which frankly seems to work much better, faster, and more easily than much of what we've been doing here.
But all things considered, I'm still getting a very classic Irish farming experience here. I've weeded acres of potato and cabbage fields. I've plucked boulders from between rows of crops (the very same unpicked boulders that have built perhaps millions of Irish houses and countless miles of stone walls over the centuries). I've been taken out to the pub after work and had whichever farm-owner was my boss that day buying us all of WWOOFers rounds of Guinness (which really is better here - common wisdom dictates that Guinness changes every time it passes over water) and if we're lucky, a live "trad session" of traditional Irish reels and ballads.
It's not all fun and games though. There are days when I spend so many hours weeding stinging nettles that my hands feel like pins and needles, and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, all I see are endless tangles of leaves, vines and stems until I jolt upright in a cold sweat, half expecting to find soil on my hands and my bed sprouting scotch grass. And there's the intimidation factor, when Kenneth says that today's job is to sow a bed of onions, five sprouts across, and what seems like billions of rows long. At least in Mali, where there were no tractors or expensive fertilizers, the fields were big but at least managable and the days were hot enough that most people didn't work past lunch. Well, nobody said that this would be a total holiday, and anyway, I am enjoying both the good hard labor getting me in shape for once, and the fact that this is the closest thing to a normal full-time job I've had since Summer 2007. Speaking of which, it's past 10pm and work starts early tomorrow. This weekend I'm off to the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. I'll fill you all in with my next blog post about all the fun we've been having, including the Street Performers World Championships, the Where's Waldo world record attempt, and Galway's Latin Street Festival. Until next time, see you next time!
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