From counting to pulling: at the new job

"You'll be coming along to plant onions in the muck Thursday" I was told by Mr. Farm Manager. Muck Soils. I had an image then, all in lights, of slogging knee-deep through sticky black soil, of heaving under the strain of the thick muck, yet persisting doggedly. I was wearing old-fashioned hip-waders. And there was a water buffalo, too, in harness.

Wait wait wait. It's just a new soil type. Settle down. 

Yes: Histosols. "Muck Soils" are histosols. There are 12 soil orders, into which all the soils on this planet can be classified (and then further classified into sub and sub-sub divisions). Histosols are one of the soil orders I had not experienced yet; they are extremely fertile soils with lots of organic matter. The muck soils I was planting onions in were drained bogs...we were essentially stamping around on a bunch of dead decomposed trees.

The stuff was pitch black: like a field of tar. But it was not deep or sticky and there certainly weren't any water buffalo. But I was a few shades darker by the time I finished the day, coated in a soil's tan. I helped plant 447 different crosses of onions and 40 onion varieties. I spent the whole day walking up and down in this soil, behind a large tractor-driven onion planter. I became adept at opening packets and dumping wee seeds into hoppers: all the onion varieties were organized and partitioned out into little envelopes. I spent hours doing the same thing over and over. This is what growing food is about, especially at a large scale.

Today I pulled weeds, without counting them first, from a bed of bodacious asparagus. Imagine that! Removing weeds for the sake of production, rather than the sake of research.

I also wrote labels for countless little plastic stakes to keep melon babies organized and named. "Shiny Boy", "Shiny Boy", "Shiny Boy" I wrote, and then some sort of inadvertent flailing and there was a vertical line where the "S" should have been. So I made that special little plant, "Boy, shiny."

I found 7 four-leaf clovers on Friday, and 3 more today. Working as a graduate student in the Puyallup fields, I thought it was just something special about that organic land. Apparently not. And now I'm among fresh people for whom all these clovers are a novelty, rather than an annoyance ("oh here comes Sandra with another 4-leaf clover again"). I just love looking for 4-leafers as I walk around, and finding one is like a little gift from the grass. Or the universe.

I think I'm used to jobs with a little more mental stimulation. I found myself talking to the cabbage babies.