Thursday June 4th, 2015

The exercise:

Write about something or someone that is: timely.

Took Max in for a haircut this afternoon. It's amazing the difference five or ten minutes can make in his appearance.

His cousin Natalie and Aunt Becky arrived this afternoon and it didn't take all that long before the two kids were making an excessive amount of noise while having just the right amount of fun together. So glad they were doing that at Grandma and Papa's house, not ours.

Spent the morning in the garden with Kat (when she wasn't chasing after our son) and Max (when he wasn't wandering off to see Grandma, or seeing what Papa was doing on the tractor, or hitting up the raspberry canes for berries). With all the weeding we managed to get done we're actually at a pretty reasonable point out there.

Not quite on top of things, but pretty darn close.

And we're about to get some help with that.

Mine:

At this point last year we already had two volunteers from the WWOOF organization camping in our backyard and working in the garden with us. I remember feeling fortunate to have found two helpers so quickly, but since it was our first year as a host farm in the organization I really had nothing to compare it to.

Fast forward to this year and we'd had a grand total of two people who had contacted us and we didn't feel like either was a very good fit here. Nothing particularly wrong with them, it's just that with a young child we're prone to being rather picky with who we want living in close quarters with us.

With a major downsize in the garden this season Kat and I had been talking about the feasibility of doing it all on our own. But we still have the same number of berries as previous years. And Max still takes up a lot of time and energy. And it would be nice to take a little more time off from the garden without having the weeds overthrow the entire system.

We don't need a huge amount of help to accomplish this - just a little bit. But was that little bit of help worth having a stranger (initially, anyway) living, eating, and working with us? We were leaning towards no - our volunteers and the work they do for us have always been greatly appreciated, but it has felt on more than one occasion very intrusive.

Enter: Rebecca.

She emailed last night, wondering if she could park her camper on the farm in exchange for maybe a day of work each week. Her camper has a bed and kitchen, all she needed is access to the bathroom. And she didn't want to volunteer too much because she has a student loan debt to pay off (through working in town for the summer).

Holy ideal, Batman.

We asked her if she'd be willing to do another half day of work each week if we gave her access to our veggies, berries, and fruit in order to keep herself fed (and honestly it would have felt wrong having someone helping us out while they bought their produce at the grocery store).

This evening she replied, quite happy with this agreement. A few emails later and... she'll be arriving Monday night.

Who knows how things will end up working out, but we're feeling pretty hopeful at this point. She sounds friendly and interesting and is looking for just the right amount of work on the farm. Combine that with the independence her camper will provide her with and we're off to a promising start.

I'm very much looking forward to meeting and working with her.