24 Hours at the Market Garden
6:11 am: The chickens raise a racket inside the mobile coop as the gator pull up. Crew member Sheridan Millington drops the electric fence, pulls the coop to fresh pasture with her gator, then resets the fence. When she opens the coop door, the chickens fly! Sheridan immediately starts collecting eggs off the coop’s manually-controlled conveyor belt. “We get about twelve dozen eggs a day this time of year,” she says. A quick check for fresh water and grain, a switch-flip to re-electrify the fence, and she hops back in the gator.
6:40am: Crew member Claire Contreras makes the daily run to the Inn to collect kitchen scraps for composting and to reclaim empty vegetable bins. After a quick dash to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to go, she heads for the compost field. “We spend a lot of time at the garden, so getting to drive by the lake is fun,” Claire says.
7:15am: Morning meeting! The team runs through the day’s pick sheet (our chef and farm store manager submitted their requests the previous evening). Market gardener Josh Carter gives further instructions. “Pick beets from the middle tunnel—the round ones, not the long ones—and make sure the cabbages have firm butts” (a technical term).
8:06am: Rachel harvests cabbage, looking for those “firm butts” Josh mentioned. “We started growing these cabbages because they’re just smaller,” she explains, “and people like smaller cabbages. They get overwhelmed by large ones.” She holds one up. “It’s so satisfying to harvest. They’re such a great shape.”
12:28pm: Jamie loads the truck with the morning’s harvest, all in bins in the cooler. Her first run is to the Inn,s. Once she starts loading, Jamie is in nearly constant motion, lifting, stacking, unloading. “My jobs have always been physical,” she explains. “I get a lot of joy out of it.”
3:42pm: Josh turns off the fertilizer injector, a mechanism that drips organic fertilizer (kelp, some helpful bacteria) into the irrigation system. He’s used it 4-5 times for the strawberries this season. “It’s like a snack for the plants,” he explains. Soon after, he hitches a container of mixed organic pesticide on his back and sprays the blossoming squashes for cucumber beetles–his last major job of the day.