Rainy Days

Storms have been rolling in for weeks now making the days cold and the nights rainy. In the hill field that we call Mary Jane's it's easy to see the clouds moving across the countryside even if they don't bring us a drop of rain. When it is raining in the town next to us, you can see a sheer wall of grey mist being dragged over the horizon. It makes for dreary days doing tunnel work, like planting peppers or tomatoes or weeding.

Unfortunately, we couldn't escape the dreaded form of precipitation. The largest hail we've ever had fall on Windflower (at least in our years) came crashing while we strung tomatoes in a high tunnel. It wasn't wind-driven, but it dented some things up pretty good, like cars and roofs.

Daren was amused . . . and amusing.

Thankfully, Ted was worried enough about the rainy weather that he wanted to leave all the crops covered for a while longer. Not that row cover can stop giant hail, but it helped. There wasn't much damage to crops that we could see. The high tunnels had bulls-eyes all over the plastic though.

Horizons...

<-- Salvador, Candelaria and Martin


To start this post, I should give some proper backstory. For several years now, we've had a Mexican family working with us on the farm, a great group of people that have fit well within the Windflower family. There's Ezequiel, the patriarch of the family, a gentleman in his sixties, his son Martin, a daughter Candelaria, and Candelaria's husband Salvador. At first Ezequiel and Salvador came to us with Green Cards, and then later we recruited Martin and Candelaria through the
H2A program (this program enables American employers to legally employ migrant labor by showing that no Americans responded to the job offer). This has worked fine and well for several years, but we were excited to learn last year that Salvador and Candelaria had applied for a family visa (like a green card for the entire family).

In the last few years, every farm season Salvador and Candelaria left their children to stay with their grandmother, while they came and worked with us from May to November, which of course is very hard on the family. The new visa would mean that the children could come with them and live in the States with them as they worked.


<-- Ezequiel harvesting husk cherries into his hat.

So, quite happily, they had their final interview on April 20th, and we found out that they got the visa! For them, it's a big change. They'll now stay in the US as permanent residents (on a long, hopeful path towards citizenship), without leaving their kids behind every farm season. For us, it's really exciting to finally meet them, and the farm parties will be even more bilingual this season. Time to brush up on Spanish, folks...