Here’s What We’ve Been Harvesting

Potatoes are a crop with a long growing time. We started from seed potatoes last fall and we just finished our second harvest last week. Here are some photos that show our team digging up the fruits of their labor!

Before the team collects the potatoes, Don Chepe tills up the dirt to reveal the spuds. Potatoes are tubers, so they grow deep into the ground. Using the tractor to dig up the spuds speeds up the process. While the machine provides efficiency in digging, the swift and resilient farmers provide efficiency in sorting and collecting the potatoes.

Our Second Cabbage Harvest

Though most harvests are labor-intensive, I found that cabbages are one that are more difficult than others. The farmers first wade through the spider webs and cut the cabbage heads from the base plant. Once they cut the heads off the plants in a bed, Juan Jose drives a tractor to pull storage containers along as Duilio and Imanol hurl the heavy heads up to Antonio and Sergio.

Sergio and Antonio make the cabbage-catching look easy. Throughout the whole harvest, I did not see them drop a single head.

Meet One of the Farmers: Elijah Rosenbaum

It’s a new week, and it’s time for a new staff spotlight! I spoke to Elijah Rosenbaum, who started at Rootbound in February, a little bit earlier than I did this winter. Originally from Bardstown, Kentucky, Elijah moved to and visited many places before landing here on our farm in Crestwood.

Elijah works in the packshed with Pillo, Omar, Jerusha, and me, but you can find him working all around the farm. Besides the packshed, he is on the harvest crew, plant crew, and field team, helping with weeding, harvesting, preparing planting beds, and seeding. But that’s not all! He also works with Branner, tending animals, so we see him out in the pastures, feeding, wrangling, moving, and providing medical care for the lamb and chickens. This vast array of tasks likely makes Elijah our most versatile team member at the moment.

Like many of the other farmers, Elijah says that he enjoys it all. When I press him to name something specific, he says, “seeding is fun” because “[It’s] just filing flats and flats.” He likes “seeing that we have seventeen different peppers” in the greenhouse while seeding because he “might not see all the peppers out in the field.” As a naturally curious person, Elijah also finds that seeding time is the best time to ask Bucky questions. He liked knowing what processes promote a good product or harvest and which processes create bad outcomes.

Since he started earlier this winter, Elijah participated in the ramp harvests. The team gets out there first thing in the morning to forage for these naturally growing wild alliums. Elijah cites this as his most memorable experience so far at Rootbound. “I don’t think I’ve done anything like harvesting something wild before.”

Sometimes, finding a home for every strawberry, tomato, pepper, cabbage, and squash is hard, so staff members take home extra items close to spoiling. At the end of the strawberry season, Elijah took home a load of strawberries that he carefully harvested from the dying field right before Don Chepe mowed it down to start a different planting. In addition to transforming our surplus into jams and sauce, Elijah likes playing Dungeons and Dragons, spending time outside, and reading Haruki Murakami.

Sheep in the Pasture

Last week, Branner moved the sheep into a new idyllic pasture to rotate their grazing land. Moving sheep to new pastures is important as we do not want to over-graze the land and also want to keep the sheep fed!