Garlic, Garlic, and more Garlic

I've been working in the vegetable and herb gardens at Primo. Emily is the head grower, as well as the bee-keeper and pig feeder. It's been fun learning about planting, and I've been doing a lot of weeding as well. Last Tuesday was my first day, and I just did a few hours. I watered a bed of newly planted peas and prepped a bed and planted some greens. I got to pick some raspberries, which were really tasty. On Wednesday, I started at 9am, which is a little early for me (understatement of the year?). I picked fava beans. And I picked more fava beans. For about three hours I picked fava beans. They're really hard to to find, because the pods look the same as the stalks and the leaves. My back hurt a lot after doing that, but it was lunch time by then.

After lunch we started the immense amount of garlic harvesting.

There were three sets of beds full of garlic, I'm guessing at least 400 bulbs altogether. The steps for harvesting garlic are:
1 - pull up garlic bulbs from ground, keeping roots and leaves intact (pretty tiring and back-breaking, especially in the hot hot sun)
2 - clean bulbs by pulling off one or two layers of skin/paper/leaf (fairly tedious and time-consuming)
3 - tie together in bunches
4 - hang bunches for about two weeks to dry out and cure

The garlic has to be kept cool while doing this until it's time to hang them. As soon as the bulbs are out of the ground, they have to go in the shade. All the cleaning and bunching has to be done in the shade. I worked with Emily and her assistant Kelly on Wednesday pulling up three beds of garlic bulbs, cleaning and bunching them. It's actually pretty gratifying work to harvest garlic. After dying in the sun while pulling it up, it's beautiful to see the bright white bulbs all cleaned and tied together.

Thursday I had the day off and decided to bike to downtown Rockland and Walmart. I was incredibly pooped by the time I got back, but I love riding my bike so much. Ben and I went to dinner at the bar at Primo on Thursday night, and the food was pretty awesome again. And again it was comped, which is such a great way to get paid.

Friday I worked in the gardens again. I picked a bunch of edible flowers for the kitchen. It's incredibly how many different types of edible flowers there are growing here. I can't remember all the names of them, but I remember having seen some of the at dinner the night before. Around 10 or so, I started on pulling up three really long beds of garlic. All by myself. By the time they were all pulled and I had brought them into the shade, Emily came over and said it was lunch time. After lunch the two of us cleaned all of it. We just finished cleaning it around 4:15, so we had family meal (Primo's staff meal, around 4pm every day), and finished bunching it afterwards. This afternoon I saw Kelly hanging them beneath the porch of the restaurant.

Yesterday and today Ben and I both had the days off, so we've been taking it pretty easy. Last night we realized that something was going on with our fridge - it was not keeping cold anymore! Since this is a new fridge, and it's been flashing "lo dc" we figured something funky was going on with the batteries. We checked them, and sure enough one of them was really low on water. For more information about why this is bad, go to wikipedia, but the basic story is that if the plates in the battery are exposed to air, the battery will kind of fry itself out or something. This morning we went to Autozone and traded in for two new batteries. We now have to see if this will completely solve the problem; we're not sure if the batteries are getting charge when we're plugged in, but we got one thing taken care of.

In a few minutes we're planning on biking to the next town over to see "Dark Knight" - if the rain doesn't come down any harder...


-Lily