Sunday, May 22, 2005

Volunteer Farming

We spent Saturday morning (10am-2pm) at Marra Farm through a Microsoft-sponsored Seattle Works project. Marra Farm is organic, and almost totally volunteer, so they always need lots of help to do basic farm work. It was great fun - we got to weed out large poison hemlock plants (some were almost 10 feet tall), turn beds of soil to get them ready for planting, and help existing plants beat the weeds by carefully removing small weedlings from the ground. And the weather was nice to boot - it wasn't sunny, it wasn't cold, it wasn't rainy. That's perfect for working out of doors, in my opinion.

Weird connection #215: One of the Marra Farm projects, Lettuce Link (donates farmed food to food banks), is led by Sue McGann. Her husband is Greek, and is from the town of Brisa on the island of Lesvos in Greece. Well, it just so happens that my maternal grandfather is from that very same town, on that very same island! Sue's husband's grandfather used to own this shop in the village, and some of my extended family actually remembers going to the shop when they were young.

Small world indeed.

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