City Slickers Farms round 2

            So yesterday Molly, Jonno, Aliza, and I headed back to West Oakland. We took a different bike route, which was nice and went past the water for a bit. Then, since I was slower than everyone else, I couldn't see them anymore so I stopped for a bit. Eventually I got back on track and luckily, the lovely Aliza had waited for me :) 
            This week our work entailed spraying and pouring emulsified fish (yea, totally disgusting) mixed with water, around some baby trees. Sarah, our supervisor/City Slickers Apprentice told us it was like a protein shake for plants. The bottle of the muddy stinky stuff says it's rich in nitrogen, and if you feed it to plants once every 3 weeks during the plants' growing season, it will give them a nutrition boost when they soak it up through their roots. Delicious!
            Then, it was back to aphid removal for a bit.
           Also, Alvin wasn't around this time :(

          After all this we headed over to a different site at Center and 16th street by the City Slickers office. Our goal here was to unload a truckload of sod into these two chicken coops. One coop was in a tiny garden on the corner. The second was in some nice guy's backyard down the block. It's really nice how people living near the garden sites offer to help out. A guy who lives near the Union Plaza site - where we were last week and yesterday morning - lets us jump over his fence and use the spigot on his house to water our plants, and some local people volunteer during working hours. Also, after jumping back over the nice guy's fence I noticed a "Beware of Dog" sign. Glad I did not see that before I entered his yard!

        It took us about 4 hours to shovel all the sod from the bed of the truck into wheelbarrows and then dump them into the chicken coops. The sod was filled with pieces of used floss, bottle caps, candy and food wrappers, pieces of glass, and many other unidentified objects. Picking out all this stuff so the chickens wouldn't die definitely slowed down the process.

       The soundtrack of the local hangout crew on the corner with their Chihuahua, billowing conversation, and swaggering personalities (make of this description what you will) enhanced the flavor of our work environment

And on the way back from the day I was actually able to keep up a bit better and we got home pretty much in time for dinner.

Jonno, Me, and Aliza after returning home