Siento el Ritmo de la Granja, de la Vida

Rachael, our cheese expert, preparing chives during harvest.

Last night I found myself sitting around a table with a group of 10, a single candle lighting the room, eating pizza after pizza and chocolate cake from our woodfire oven, drinking homebrewed beer and ginger ale almost till the dawn. Laughing, conversing (multilingual), singing everything from "Shady Grove" to Chango Spasiuk. There´s a guitar, harmonicas, clapping, stomping, and pounding on the table. We're a tight knit group from many different places, and many different backgrounds. ¡Que buena onda!

Daily, I am pinching myself. Moments like this really stick with you- and I´ve had so many already. I keep catching myself wondering "how in the heck did I wind up in this situation"? Take it from me, grass-roots traveling is the way to go! There´s got to be no better way to soak up the culture of a place. And what a culture this place has! The art, music, and community I´m finding here is so rich! Three months here are going to fly by.

Life on the farm is very rythmic. There is always so much to be done, yet it never becomes stressful. We do what we can, we apply ourselves and work hard. But we never over-work. The farm community generates an inertia which carries all of us on. Some daily tasks are recurring, but no two days are alike. The seasons progress, the crops grow. We work, and we enjoy the fruits, veggies, cheeses, beers, and breads of our labor. It´s a vital, tangible, and satisfying existance.

Un Dia Tipico:

We wake up just before the sun peaks over the eastern crest of our valley, about 8 am. The mornings are cold and damp. In a jacket and beanie I make the quarter mile hike from my log cabin to the community kitchen. On the way I fill the water basin for los gansos (geese), and top of the chicken feed, water, and whey at the hen house. The first person the the kitchen prepares breakfast, usually oatmeal, bread, or flatbreads. We eat, share a round of maté, and discuss our plans and goals for the day. Every monday we start by taking an hour or two to stroll through the granja, noting the state of all the crops, and making a to-do list for the week. Once the list is made, each of us can do whatever job we´d like whenever we´d like to do it. Alex really makes a point of involving us in the short and long term planning for the farm, creating a sense of ownership in the farm and it´s community. We´ve all traveled and worked quite extensively and each of us has a unique perspective to offer. There´s a lot of idea sharing, experiementation, and a lot of learning that happens as a result.

We start work at 9 and go about our tasks untill 1. Lunch and dinner are prepared for the group by one of us on a rotating basis. With anywhere between 5 and 8 people working any given day, you end up cooking a meal every third day or so. Food depends largely on whats available from the garden, if there are extra eggs, a batch of cheese that for one reason or another we won´t give out to the Associativa, ect. Beans and rice are staples. There are a lot of stews, veggie stirfrys, and polenta casseroles. Several of the weeds commonly seen in the granja are actually great for salads. There are wild turnips, lambsquarter (sp?), and something else... I can´t remember it´s name. Its leaves are very tender and have a lemony flavor. I´ve cooked 3 times so far. The first turned out asi asi (it´s a mud hut with a wood fire and camping stove, gimmie a break!), the second two though- muy bueno, if I may say myself! Butter is sparse though, which makes it a challenge for me... some of ya´ll know what I´m talking about.

After we eat we siesta till 5. Thats 4 free hours in the middle of the day, EVERY DAY! I go for short hikes, play guitar with Jeremy or John, go for a swim, read, do yoga by the river, whatever I feel like that day.

At 5 we resume working, and eat dinner shortly after sunset at 8. I love our free rein, task focused work method. I like to finish what I start, and this structure gives me the ability to either indulge that, or change gears and work on something different if a task isn´t jiving. Some tasks I´ve been involved with are caring for the gallinas, weeding and tranplanting in the garden, seeding in almasigos, I helped seed trigo sareceno with the horse drawn plow, construction of the greenhouse (so far that´s involved cement and rebar work, and some basic carpentry), making a lemon rose-hip champagne for our Christmas boxes, and of course harvest! We harvest every wednesday and send our boxes to all the families in the Associativa. This week´s boxes had lettuce, kale, chard, chives, radishes, turnips, parsley, eggs, strawberries, mountain spinach, an herb boque, and the member´s choice of jam, chutney, salsa, cheese, or beer.

We eat dinner at 8, and kick around in the kitchen socializing by candelight till 9:30 or 10, when people start retiring for the evening.

Wow, another novel. I wonder how many of you made it through, haha!

Hasta luego, salud y felicidad!

The new invernadero, in construction

A better angle of the farm... maybe. Still searching for the right spot to capture the feel of the valley.

Queso de vaca.

Freshly transplanted tomato plants. I did 60 plants on one of our hottest days and didn´t lose a single one!

The group playing totem. Ask me to teach you at home, its way fun! From front clockwise to back- Jeremy, Jillian, Partick, Jenna, Alex, y Sebastion.

Bottling the champagne! Mariano eating a lemon in back is a fantastic musician.

A weeded and mulched bed on the right, compared with an unweeded bed on the left. We weed, trim the flowers, and mulch the bed with what we pulled up. This inhibits regrowth and acts as a green manure! Pretty darn clever.