Journal: Volunteering at Little Hands On the Farm
August 18, 2011 at 8:38pm
It’s called The Garden. The instructions are to grab a seed and a shovel, plant the seed in the dirt, then walk to the end of the garden and harvest it. In reality kids are grabbing round plastic tokens bearing the image of a vegetable, burying them, grabbing a decorative Styrofoam vegetable from a basket, and moving on to The Grainery. My job is to dispense instructions where needed, and occasionally use a garden rake to find and gather the buried seed tokens. It’s a beautiful sunny day with a light breeze, so I have no complaints with being outside for a four-hour shift on a well-beloved exhibit at the Iowa State Fair. Also the seed-planting part is not open due to rain earlier in the day…that’s mainly why I have no complaints.
12:30 Sky is blue, people are happy, job is easy, tomatoes look real enough to eat….life is good.
12:35 Exhibit supervisor comes by and declares the garden dry enough for planting. There goes easy. But it’s still beautiful out, and my co-gardener is wearing a bandanna like Rambo, so I still have no complaints.
12:45 Raking seed tokens out of the dirt. Families really love this exhibit!
1:00 It’s interesting talking to Rambo. Turns out he tilled up his backyard and planted it with corn, to avoid further maintenance, and is raising thirteen meat rabbits because it sounded interesting. He cleared up my confusion about two heavy elderly women who were watching us from a bench in the exhibit. They caught my interest because they were wearing official tags, and because they’d moved our water cooler off the bench onto the ground to make room for themselves. (It’s the kind of water cooler that has to be on a bench to be used). “Security,” he explained. Their widespread Fareway ads certainly look ferocious.
1:15 Raking again. The hardest thing about this job is dodging family photos.
1:30 Rambo and I joke about the obviously-local band playing nearby. Kids are getting confused because they dig up three or four pepper seeds in their attempt to bury one potato, so I grab the rake and get back to work. Our security detail has fallen asleep.
1:45 Raking. Again.
2:00 Good idea: They should make the seed chips metal, so we can search for them with metal detectors.
2:30 We can hear a tractor pull going on in the main grandstand. It fills the silences when the death metal band next door is taking a breath. (Really, who scheduled that next to a kid’s exhibit?)
2:45 Still raking. I overhear a father encouraging his son to “bury it real deep!”
3:00 Better idea: they should make this a rotating exhibit: A garden for half an hour, then an archeological dig for half an hour.
3:30 The tractor pull is still going on; inky black smoke billows into the blue sky above the exhibit that teaches children how natural and healthy Iowa agriculture is. It sounds like one of the monsters is charging toward us. I wonder: Once it breaks into sight, how many kids can I toss out of its path before I get pulverized?
4:00 Best idea: They should make the seed chips radioactive, so we can search for them with Geiger counters.
4:15 I swear some of the boy children coming through are growing mustaches.
4:25 What’s your definition of insanity? Mine is raking a dirt patch free of plastic tokens and sorting them into baskets, so kids can grab them out of the baskets and bury them in the freshly-raked dirt.
