Gleaning

Today, Jeremy, Jeff, and I went gleaning and harvesting. I had never done this before, so it was a new experience. We went out toward Center (small town northwest of here) to harvest about 100 feet of carrots. Although this may sound easy, it really wasn't. The ground was pretty hard from the rain and then cold temperatures. So, we first had to loosen the ground without chopping off the carrots. It was a skill some of us had to develop. You can see the row of carrots in the top picture. It looked quite short when we walked up to it. There were about 30 people gleaning with us. Many of them came down from some churches in Colorado Springs. I guess the one church and one of the women had been doing this for the last 14 years. She had a great spirit about her and was a joy to work beside. Jeremy became skilled at lifting up bunches of carrots with his shovels for us to take and de-top and add to the collection. There would be as many as 10-15 in one shovel full; they were planted so close together. The second picture is of Jeremy and Claudia with carrots they were able to uproot whole. Claudia is a Vida/AmeriCorps volunteer who does migrant education. Emmy knows her through work meetings. The bottom picture on the left is me with my first successful bunch of carrots. I had been breaking them in half when trying to get them out of the ground. I would also like you to admire the beautiful magenta/pink sweatshirt I have on. I borrowed it from Re-Threads before we left because it was much colder and winder than I had expected it to be. Our leader thought we harvested about 3/4 ton of carrots. Most of these were headed to the food bank customers.

We took a lunch break at Azteca Mexican restaurant in Center. It was a great buffet where we became stuffed!! Jeremy and I sat with a lot of the volunteers from Springs. The ladies were a treat. They said they thought Mennonites were very industrious people and very service-minded. They also wanted to know if we came because of our church or for personal reasons. What they meant was, Are Mennonites required to go serve for a year, like the Mormons? Our answer, of course, was, No, we came because we wanted a break from jobs to serve others in the name of Jesus, but not because we had to come.

After lunch, we went to the potato field to glean. Gleaning is just what you have read about in the Bible in Ruth. (Refresher... Ruth goes into the Boaz's fields to glean. She catches his eye. He invites her to stay. They get married.) The potato equipment was still actually harvesting potatoes; I am told that it is unusual to allow gleaners in the field at the same time as the harvesting equipment. The harvesting equipment has large conveyors on it that somehow picks up the harvested potatoes. (See picutre of equipment to left.) The potatoes were sitting in rows, just piled up and untaken. It was amazing what was left! The farmers (at both the carrot and potato farms) say they only leave 2% of the crop, but it sure feels like a lot was left. Just a side note... Colorado is the second largest potato producing state, following Idaho! This work, gleaning potatoes, was difficult - not to find the potatoes (they were very visible), but fighting the dust. The wind was blowing straight across the dirt fields. Even with your back to the wind, dust flew in your face. It made for long work. You can see people fighting the dust in the picture to the left. All in all, our leader thought we gleaned approximately a ton of potatoes. Most of these are also headed to the food bank.

At the very end of the day, my car went to the mushroom farm just outside of Alamosa. I neglected to take pictures, but is an interesting place. The mushrooms grow by species in separate rooms. Each room has "bunk beds" - 4 high - with mushroom growing. The mushrooms are cut off at the stem by the workers. Each room of mushrooms can be harvested every three days; they grow back that quickly. The rooms are cleaned with chemicals after each harvest because disease can spread so quickly and kill all the mushrooms in an entire room. I brought home unwanted mushrooms (stores had rejected them for some reason) to the house - oyster, portebella, shitake, and sliced white. I really don't like mushrooms, so they all look pretty disgusting. I am told that some are pretty expensive varieties. I am just hoping I don't have to eat mushrooms all next week! :)