TL;DR

It was my official first day on the farm. We worked in the greenhouse and then the field planting scallions, lunch break, then more scallion planting until it started snowing.

Onion Trimming

In USDA zone 6b (-5 to 0 °F/-20.6 to -17.8 °C), the crops you start in the greenhouse this early in the season are often the hardy kind…brassicas like kale and allums like onions…and lettuces…things that can withstand the occasional light frost under row cover.

Onions in particular love to grow their greens tall, but what we really want once we’re planting them are healthy roots and shoots that make it easy to remove from cell trays. So we “trim” them in the greenhouse to about 2-3 inches when they get cumbersome to handle…kind of like giving them a haircut when they start to get a bit shaggy. This also encourages the plant to put its energy into its root system.

However, doing hundreds of trays with scissors by hand gave me time to think about other options such as electric shears or paired with a vacuum system like a Flowbee for veg. Some things simply need to be done as told though and there’s almost always a good reason for the way it works already.

The Greenhouse

The 20x80-foot greenhouse is already full of seedlings, at least a month’s work already by others. It has a 4-foot walkway down the middle, but otherwise each growing surface side is about 8 feet deep to the walls. The trays sit on “ladders” made of 2x4-foot beams and laid on sawhorses. Getting to the far reaches means taking some trays out to create standing space in the middle of a space, then moving around various trays while standing in the space.

Lunch

Lunch was a fresh fried egg sandwich made by Jamie. It’s really nice that we all sit together and that he feeds us. I plan to bring some home made things like breads and pickled veg throughout the season.

Planting and Physical Fitness (or Not)

After finishing up planting in the snow, my knees were covered in mud. I haven’t figured out how to bend and squat instead of kneeling across four foot rows.

Though I did a lot of farm work last season as a volunteer, these were only 3-4 hour shifts and I wasn’t too worried about looking out of shape. Keeping up with the crew is going to be an uphill struggle this month, despite how understanding and polite about it. One of them even goes to the gym after working an 8am-5pm day on the farm.

It will get easier and I am out of shape but not for long.

Side-note: a change of each article of base layer clothing is always a good thing to bring with you.

Official Part-time Employee

After that, due to some email issues, I went home to change and came back with my passport which was needed to get my required paperwork into payroll.

Subsequent Notes Optimization

I’m a verbal communicator. In many contexts, I have to hold this back to work with folks effectively. I’ve always wondered where I could put this to better use rather than feel like it was a personal character flaw. My current hypothesis is that if on my way home from the farm, I record personal audio notes, I don’t have to hold back or be word perfect.

When I’m done recording, I just upload them to a specific Google Drive folder where some of my custom code looks to pick up and process new recordings. I’ve already got my own personal transcription service in my homelab as well as an LLM-based summarization service using simple context templates to generate mostly bullet points.

Here’s an example from today’s audio notes:

Activities Done:

1. Planting scallions
2. Potted up different varieties of tomatoes and eggplant
3. Trimming onions
4. Loading and unloading trucks

New Things Not Yet Encountered:

1. Sawhorses with ladders and a four-foot walking way in between
2. Specific type of ladder (H or pie-shaped)
3. How to move trays around the least, preserving efficiency

Questions and Future Areas of Research:

1. Names of different varieties
2. Management over effects of repetitive work on back and knees
3. Other ways to trim onions and chives (possibly electric shears)
4. Specific conditions required for irrigation systems

Suggested Actions:

1. Review and remember names of tomato varieties
2. Research mechanisms that might repetitive speed greenhouse trimming
3. Invest in a personal temperature gauge or indoor temperature sensor
4. Research specifics of irrigation systems and their differences from other fields