I found myself in the rustic fields of Brooktondale, 10 miles or so out from Ithaca, on a clear and sweltering Tuesday morning. A single dilapidated sign peeking out in the middle of a winding road was the only indication of my destination, with the entire place nestled comfortably against a dense woods. I would’ve driven right by if it weren’t for a familiar figure just behind a stretch of trees, and I hurriedly signalled my mom to stop the car. Dressed rather excessively to protect against the glaring sunlight, I walked up the driveway to greet a man with a smile and a handshake. It had been nearly a month since I last saw Robert Tuori, IHS chemistry teacher and proprietor of Nook & Cranny farm. We’d talked a bit about his farm during the school year, and a few emails were all it took for me to get a job as a farmhand for a day. Two other IHS students, Jason Wang ’17 and Ronan Perry ’16, would also be helping out, in addition to the more permanent employees.
I had a cup of coffee, home-brewed by Tuori himself, and then we headed a few miles out to his fields, a fairly large expanse surrounded by trees. It was around 11:00 a.m. when our first task commenced: harvesting garlic and hanging it to dry. We used pitchforks to gently extract the bulbs from the soil, after which we grouped them into bunches of 10 before tightly winding them with twine. Two bunches went with one length of twine, each one tied to an end. While not exhausting, the work was tedious, especially in the heat. We switched jobs at intervals, from harvesting to tying to hauling. I mainly worked on tying the garlic together, and a pile of the stuff began to grow at a surprising rate. Slowly, we made progress through the long row of garlic, a trail of disturbed earth and unused rope scattered in our wake.
With the final crops of our harvest pulled out and prepared for drying, we stacked them high on a trailer and drove to a nearby shed, where some older garlic was already hanging from the rafters. We three students quickly scurried back and forth, handing the tied garlic to Tuori, who was perched up on a stepladder. At long last we stepped back to admire our handiwork: bundles of bulbs hanging expectantly like Christmas stockings from the wooden beams. Some quick calculations gave us a total of 1,400 bulbs from the day’s work. Tuori looked faintly annoyed, muttering about a higher expected yield, but we got back into the car and drove back to the fields.
Upon returning, an enormous pile of fertilizer greeted us. A shovel was placed in my hands, and we began to scoop the dark, loamy material into wheelbarrows for scattering on the now garlic-free space. After 20 minutes of that came weeding a long row of onions. Despite all the clothing I’d brought, gloves were conspicuously absent, and my already roughed-up hands quickly became covered in dirt. I grimaced as my fingers accidentally closed around a particularly spiky plant, its protest at being removed loud and clear against my sensitive skin. Small bits of conversation floated among us as we inched along the ground. I talked a bit with Mike, one of the farmhands, who’d been to Hawaii just a few months back and eaten the best Thai food he’d ever had. Finally, Tuori called for a break, and we slowly regrouped near our cars for lunch. The other workers headed out their various ways to grab a quick meal, while we students (we’d all brought our own lunches) followed Tuori back to his house to rest.
After eating and playing around with Tuori’s dog, we once again drove out, this time in another direction to a much wider field than before. However, only a small portion of it, marked off with a rectangle of bare soil from the rest of the verdant meadow, belonged to Tuori. Tuori had hauled along a tilling machine, a dusty, largish device which rattled noisily along its two wheels, two handles poking out from behind for steering.
The other workers slowly arrived, one at a time; the first brought out a collection of hoes from his car (Tuori, upon hearing some muffled snickering, drily remarked upon the immature minds of all teenagers). We began our final and most strenuous task of the day: hilling potatoes. The tubers had to be well-buried underneath the soil to grow effectively, and so we were tasked with breaking up the hard, rocky earth and piling it around the long stems of the plants. An army of weeds, many of which were far taller and more resilient than the potato plants themselves, was present to slow our progress. The tilling machine was used to break up the soil to make it easier to work with, but we still had to do the manual labor.
The scorching sun bore down unbearably on the shadeless field; I was infinitely grateful for the green sunhat that rested on my head. I learned how to hold a hoe correctly to avoid hurting my back. Our water bottles were quickly drained in breaks between hilling, refilled from a large Mason jar, and then drained again. The carcasses of eviscerated plants littered the ground in limp heaps. Three hours became a blur, the monotony of our work broken up only when we finished a row or took a quick rest under the shade of a nearby tree. It was mindless and exhausting, but strangely enjoyable; I remained determined and put in my best effort until the last row had been completed.
With the sun slowly making its way towards the hills in the distance, most of the workers decided to call it a day and bade farewell. We returned to Tuori’s residence, where a check for $55 was written for each student worker, representing seven hours of hard work. We chatted among ourselves for a short while before leaving for our homes, ready to sleep off a day’s honest work.