For the next 6 weeks, we will be living at the Gorman Heritage Farm, 120 acres in the middle of a bustling suburb of Cincinnati called Evendale. The farm, the oldest and one of the only remaining farms in the area, is used for educational purposes so that people can visit to learn about farming methods, rent a garden plot, or buy meats and vegetables produced here.
Gorman Farm grows corn, alfalfa, different types of lettuce, berries, apples, potatoes and that sort of thing. Our neighbors are goats, horses, mules, roosters, cows, bunnies, and chickens. The goats are pretty friendly:
A lot different from Boston, as you can imagine. When we toured the farm with our sponsor on Friday it hit me how bananas it is to go from working 9 to 5 at a desk in one of the busiest cities in the country to hanging out with cows on a farm 900 miles away. On Monday, we start work on our project, fixing old trails and building new ones on a hill adjacent to the farm. Members of the community use these paths for exercise, to cut through from one housing development to another, or to get to the Walmart, which is literally a 5 minute walk from our house. But when the paths were originally built the grading was incorrect, so there are a ton of crazy-steep paths and muddy areas where rainwater collects.
That's where our team comes in. It will be a lot of hard manual labor using tools I'd never heard of before AmeriCorps like pulaskis and MacCleods. It's likely I'll even get chainsaw trained in the next couple weeks! I'm really looking forward to the change of pace.
On a side note, the farm house we're staying in is reportedly haunted and I'm pretty excited about it. I just got a new digital camera this weekend so I'll try to take some good ghost shots and post those bad boys on here.
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