harvest part 1

08/06/08
It is harvest time here! Yes, I know, it is barely June. But it is still time to harvest the wheat and the rosemary. I have helped some with both of these harvests. It’s fun! In a hard labor, dusty, satisfying sort of way. It had been a while since I had done any real agricultural type work like that, although I used to work on a vegetable farm and then after that worked at a horse farms for years. Lots of hay bales and straw bales got thrown around by rather smallish women over those years at the horse farm… Similarly here: lots of stacks of wheat and sticks get carried around by very small women.
The rosemary harvest has been going on for some weeks now. Rosemary grows wild all over the mountains here… it smells quite beautiful when it rains. Taking advantage of this, some of the people in my village have formed a Medicinal Plants Cooperative. They go out and cut lots and lots of the rosemary, and then pile it in long lines to dry in the sun. Rosemary is a small bush, so what they are cutting off is essentially lots of sticks with pine-needle-like leaves all over them. Once it is deemed dry enough, people take small piles of it and beat it with a stick to knock all of the leaves off. The branches and sticks get set aside and then carried away to be used as firewood. It seems that it is mostly women who do this. I have seen some men working on it or at least overseeing it but for the most it is the women who did the gathering and beating, and only women who carry the wood back to the village.
It’s ingenious, really. They stack the sticks probably 5 feet high, 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep, tie rope around it, put a burlap bag on their back to keep from getting scratched and lash the whole thing to their backs with the end of the same rope, as though it were a hug, bulky, scratchy backpack. They do the same with alfalfa, wheat, big tree branches, and bags of flour. All of these loads range between 20 and 50 pounds, I would estimate. Keep in mind only a few of these women are over 5’5" and many are a good deal shorter.
The wheat harvest was somewhat different. The men did most of the cutting and binding into sheaves (with a break for tea), and then the women come and haul it all back to the drying and threshing grounds (also with a break for tea). There it stays for a while, all piles of gold. You can hear groups of men working in one part of the valley or another, because they sing when they are harvesting. The women I worked with weren’t singing, though. We also used donkeys and mules to help carry the wheat. It amazes me how much weight they carry too.
I helped with the beating of the rosemary and the carrying of the wheat. Little enough, actually, because sometimes people seem to think I am not strong enough to help. Which I am, right now. But I will not be if I don’t get to do my part carrying heavy loads. I guess that is just a matter of stubbornly offering my help and hopefully it will be accepted. :)