First day at Lacrover!
Today was the first service day for the VaTo group, and I’m doing my service work at Lacrover Farm, a local sustainable-organic farmer. When Jason and Val first mentioned our service projects to us and told us about Lacrover, I immediately knew I’d want that to be my project because I had done a lot of work this past year on agricultural policy with my senior thesis for environmental studied. Monday’s brief trip just confirmed my initial impulse, and being there today was the ultimate vindication.
The farm is owned by a husband-wife team, and Katie picked me up from the parking lot of FHL here at 8:15 this morning. We stopped by the ferry to pick up another girl, Tessa, who is volunteering there, and after picking up some empty cartons and bags from CSA (I think that’s for the “Community Supported Agriculture” people who pay a regular fee and have produce set aside for them), we went to the farm. Katie and Paul put me right to work picking raspberries, which I’d never done before. I never thought about it, but that little hollow inside a raspberry is because the part we eat is hugging this little cone-shaped structure that probably has a name…for some reason that just struck me as fascinating, even if most other people had already kind of figured it out. Other fascinating things picking the raspberries; there was an enormous spider with a bee wrapped up in its web and it was starting to eat it. And I saw a little bright green frog sitting on the raspberry leaves. Maybe this stuff sounds boring to most people but I guess I’m a sucker for being so close to nature like that…OK, so a farm isn’t exactly natural, but you know what I mean.
Then I picked beans with Paul and we were talking about my environmental thesis, he was really interested in my research on soil carbon which was nice because I think he’s the first person I’ve met outside of the environmental department at Penn who wanted to hear about it. And we talked about politics too! I realized just how far removed I am from my Penn political science/politics experiences when I forgot the name of the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania who was catapulted out of office in 2006 by the Democratic candidate, whose campaign I worked on. But I remembered it a little while later, so that made me feel better.
After that I picked 36 pints of strawberries and washed potatoes (lunch was in there somewhere too). The whole day was just such a good one for me, sitting in the warm sunshine, picking strawberries while listening to the music of Incubus, Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana on my iPod, not worrying about the yellow jackets buzzing around my hands or the enormous spiders that kept running up my pants. And getting a bit of time with their cats and dog is really nice for me because I miss my own cat a lot. I bought some of the beans I’d picked and potatoes I’d washed to send to my parents, my mom just overnighted me a ton of warm base layers and other warm gear so this will be like a little thank you. Lacrover will definitely be a very good thing for me here.
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