Last working days at MSF

---

It's 16.36 8th of June. We're currently 4 hours into the 31 hour bus journey to Winnipeg, but more in that in the next post.
So I think I got up to Wednesday night. Thursday day time was much the same as usual, it was a hot, cloudless day and there was a lot of work to be done. We started the day as we had the last few days - cutting the salad greens for an order. There wasn't all that much, so shortly after we were tasked with erecting a trellis in the field to grow tomatoes on. The first job was to salvage 70 1.5+ metre tall metal poles from the scrap pile. Once we had loaded these into the gator, we brought them out to the field and set about setting then up into 5 rows of 14, about a metre apart. To get them into the earth we had to use a handheld ram that slotted over the top of the pole and could be used to knock them into the dry earth.
As Matt and I did this, Rosie and Kate took on the incredibly tedious task of planting 6 rows of celery plants - equating to about 700 plants. Thankfully before too long we were needed in the barn to package up the salad for market and delivery, which took us past lunch. We finished off the day back out in the field, Rosie and Kate finishing the celery planting, while Matt and I started composting the lines between the trellis poles. This was also a pretty tiresome job as we had to shovel compost into 12 boxes that were then loaded into the gator, then laid in a line between the posts. One trip usually composted 4 or 5 of the 70 poles, and took between 20-30 minutes. It was a particularly long day.
As far as I can remember it was pretty quick to bed that night, as we were pretty knocked out from the work. Friday morning we woke to find the weather had broken again, and a steady rain had set in. Laura and Dakota had the weekend off so we're leaving around midday - so most of the work was up to us. Luckily it was a pretty straight forward day. We weeded one of the large greenhouses with the new hoes Sandy had bought. The humidity was terrific however, so it wasn't easy work. Once that was done we needed to move an AC unit, then it was time for lunch. After lunch Mike told us it was (thankfully) too wet to compost the rest of the trellis, so we spent the afternoon in the nursery seeding squash and watching the thunderstorms roll by. By 6 we had finished and headed in to dry off as the rain finally petered out.
That evening Sandy (who is a guy, if I haven't made that clear) and Adam came round for a few beers and a barbecue. And so we sat drinking home brew and chatting into the evening, at first around the kitchen table then outside around the barbecue where Adam cooked caribou and crocodile sausages.
One of Sandy's friends was also there - who looked the epitome of a redneck, but was actually a genuinely lovely guy, and looked after his wife's 4 autistic sons (his stepsons) as well as his own 2 daughters.
By 11pm we moved into the drive shed where Sandy had set up a table and sound system where we sat and drunk Steam Whistle while Sandy regaled us with anecdotes from his life. They were the kind of stories that are endlessly interesting and funny but nonetheless usually improbable if not unbelievable. And usually I would have put them down to hyperbole and too much beer - but Sandy seemingly had evidence of every single one, from having to put down an injured deer with an axe to having beers with Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford. Evidently Sandy's lived quite a life. We finally headed to bed at 2am.
We were up at 7.30 the next day, and I wasn't feeling too bad, bar lack of good sleep. The weather had cleared up, and the day was much the same as Thursday. We needed a little salad for market the next day, so we cut it while Mike washed it, and we all weighed and packed it. We ordered a pizza in for lunch as none of us could be bothered to cook, and we were also getting a little low on food. The other job that needed to be done was composting the rest of the trellis, then planting the tomatoes. The day wasn't quite as hot and all 4 of us were working on it, so it was a little more agreeable than it was on Thursday. It was also pretty satisfying that we had made a dry patch of earth into a huge tomato patch in just a couple of days.
We clocked off at 6 again, and pretty much collapsed into the house. Rosie and I napped for a couple of hours, then we all finished off our pizza for dinner. Since we had napped for so long neither Rosie or I were particularly tired by 10pm, so grabbed the torch and walked the 20 minutes up the road to the 24hr Tim Hortons to grab a decaf coffee and some chocolate milk. It was 11pm by the time we were home, and time for bed.
And so that pretty much ends our time at MSF, excluding Sunday - which I'll include in the next blog. Now, for me, it's another 25 hours on this bus.

---