Our dad was King of the Row Crop. That man could grow anything! When I was just a baby we lived in Arizona where he farmed cotton and hay. Once we moved here to Kern County he farmed lettuce, bell pepper, potatoes, and tomatoes and those are just the things I knew about, I’m sure there were tons of other produce that he farmed that I didn't know about.
One year he had a crop of romaine lettuce that was legendary! All you saw as far as the eye could see was rows upon rows of beautiful, huge, green Romaine Lettuce! I'm not even kidding, just look at the picture! That's my dad and his romaine lettuce!
I remember going out there with my mom and siblings and our children to see them. He had been bragging and begging us to come out to the ranch. Mom took her video camera and we have some beautiful footage of my dad walking in his fields and talking to his workers. It’s something I will never forget. Just as I cherish this picture that I took that day. Dad loved farming!
None of us...his children...were born with as green a thumb as his. But we do try! Recently my sister and I remembered a flower that my mom used to grow when we lived in the Imperial Valley. In Spanish we knew it as Rayo de Sol, translated to Ray of Sunshine. The lady that lived next door to us there, Vicenta, cut a small clipping off of her existing plant and gave it to my mom. She planted it and it just grew like gangbusters!!! The official name of the plant is Portulaca, but it's called by many names.
What I loved at the time and remember now about the flower is that it bloomed best and most beautifully during the dog days of summer! The hotter it was the happier this flower was and the bigger it smiled. My sister Lisa and I recently went on a hunt for Portulaca and had to go to several different nursery's before finally finding it and buying a flat which we split in half. And then we got to planting!
The first picture are my flowers, the second are Lisa's flowers. Not bad right?
ALICIA'S RAYO DE SOL/PORTULACA
LISA'S RAYO DE SOL/PORTULACA
The one flat gave us enough plants to fill two big planters like the ones pictured here and then a smaller one. I think we did a pretty good job following in our father's footsteps or green thump print!
My dad fed the world with what he planted and grew and harvested...so we are starting small here, but I think we're doing pretty good for rookies!
Have you ever heard of these flowers? What's your favorite flower? Do you have a green thumb?
My dad was a farmer/rancher his whole life. He could grow anything, anywhere. He started his ranching career on little ranches near a small town in Arizona named Eloy. My first memory of my dad is his leaving or coming back from work in a white company truck, wearing his cowboy boots and straw cowboy hat. That was his work uniform.
Whenever he got together with my uncles I remember the conversation always revolved around what they were farming and how good the crops were this year, or how bad, just depending on the weather, plague, wind, freeze...all those variables that farmers had to deal with for each season.
When we were in Eloy, Arizona, my dad grew cotton. Beautiful, white, fluffy cotton. We moved around alot and my dad was always learning and growing in his knowledge of products to plant and grow. I remember him planting tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers and lettuce They called him "King of the Row Crop". Anything that grew in rows my dad became an expert at growing.
When I was a junior in high school, my dad decided that he wanted my sister and me to work in the fields so we would get a taste for hard work, hoping that we would decide it didn't taste that good and we would instead study hard, get a good education and not work as hard as he and my mother had always done. He and my mother met while both picking cotton in Eloy, Arizona.
I remember the day before our first day of work, my dad sat us down and told us that once we were out there, we were representing him, we were reflections of the type of worker he was and that he expected us to work harder, longer and more diligently than anyone else out there. Out there in the fields we were expected to make him proud.
That next morning, we arose before the sun, we put on the clothes my mom had set aside for us as work clothes. Jeans, a t-shirt, a long sleeved cotton shirt to protect us from the sun, a bandanna around our neck and a big straw hat. My mom also went to work with us and she got up earlier than all of us and made burritos that we would eat in the field for breakfast, breaks and lunch. My dad fit us all into his truck and off we went into the fields to pick tomatoes.
In the field, the sun was just barely starting to rise and we went to the crew pusher and got two buckets each and a card that looked like a standard time card but instead had little numbered circles. We wrote our names at the top then headed out into the fields. Our job was to fill each of our two buckets with green tomatoes, we picked them before they ripened on the vine. Once our two buckets were filled we lifted them up, one bucket in each hand and walked out of the row we were in towards a waiting tractor where a man would grab our buckets, empty them into bins on a trailer being pulled by a tractor and then he would pull a little hole punch out of his pocket and punch out two of the holes...and back into the fields we went. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, the rows with the tomatoes were uneven and filled with dirt clods and the vines would trip you, plus it was hot and humid and dirt and flies were everywhere!
We found out right away that I was not good at picking tomatoes. I was too slow. My mom and sister on the other hand were super fast. Luckily what I was good at was lifting those buckets and hauling them out of the fields to the guy on the tractor and coming back and hauling more buckets to the guy on the tractor, and c'mon...I was in high school, I was cute, I had a beautiful smile so the guys on the tractors would more often than not jump off the tractors and meet me halfway down the rows and carry the buckets for me...it didn't hurt that I was the bosses daughter either.
But in my mind I kept hearing my dads words, I was a reflection on him and I worked my buns off! My mom and my sister worked their buns off! We did this for most of the summer. It was hot, dirty, sweaty work. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't, but I made my dad proud!
When tomato picking season was over my dad asked me if I wanted to try working on the tomato harvesting machines. These machines ran at night and they harvested the ripened tomatoes. I would have to go to work without my mom and my sister, but my dad would be there all night supervising the whole operation. Of course I said yes, I wanted my dad to be proud of me and I found out early on that I really liked getting a paycheck!
Here's an excellent video showing the process, it even shows a lady on the machine which would have been me.
Now that doesn't look so bad in the daytime, but remember, I was working at night with big flood lights so I could see what I was doing. It was hot and humid, at times cold and wet. The machines felt like you were on a huge boat, they rocked back and forth in the uneven rows, some of the tomatoes were over ripe and squishy and rotten and smelly!
I can remember working until my stomach couldn't take anymore and then I would turn around and vomit into the field. Then I would go back to working and continue until I had to turn around and vomit again. I did this for two nights. On the third night someone told my dad that I shouldn't be there, that I was sick too much and I wasn't eating and that even though I was doing a good job he felt sorry for me. My dad came and rode on the machine with me for a while. I tried to suck it up and not get sick but finally I couldn't take it and I had to turn around and puke over the side of the rail. That was it, my dad said I had to quit, he couldn't allow me to continue. I begged and begged him, telling him I was ok, I could do it. He finally took me in his arms and said, "You proved that you're my daughter and that you work as hard as anyone, I don't want you to do this anymore, you can try again next year, go to my truck and go to sleep." So I did, but I made my dad proud and even better I was a good reflection of the hard-working man he was.
So to make a long story even longer, my purpose for this post is because throughout the years I have worked with people that have hired their kids to work for them. A few I have admired, they had the same work ethic as my dad and their kids were outside washing cars and cleaning gum off the sidewalks, just like everyone else.
But I've worked with the opposite as well. Those bosses that hire their kids and let them get away with murder but turn a blind eye to it. At times it seems to me that they can't even see that their kids are slacking and making their parent look bad. I wonder at times if that isn't part of what's wrong with kids today, their parents want to make everything easy for them, they don't want their kids to struggle or suffer. I wonder at times if those parents don't worry about what will happen if tomorrow they are hit by a bus and their child has to go out into the real world and work for a real boss who will expect real productivity and isn't just going to pat them on the back for doing nothing.
I'm glad that I had the parents that I had. I know that I was truly blessed in life to have them. They have made me who I am today. Anything that is bad in me cannot be blamed on them because they were excellent leaders. I always say "lead by example" and my favorite quote is "integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking". Am I always perfect? Oh gosh no...far, far, far from it! But all that is good in me is due to my parents who didn't worry about being my friends.
I HAVE TO ADD A "P.S". TO THIS POST. MY POSTS AUTOMATICALLY POST TO MY FACEBOOK PAGE. ONE OF MY FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ACTUALLY WORKED WITH ME THOSE SUMMERS THAT I DESCRIBE IN THIS POST, BOBBY IS HIS NAME. HE WAS A COUPLE YEARS AHEAD OF ME IN HIGH SCHOOL AND HIS DAD "MAS" WAS MY DAD'S BOSS.
BOBBY MESSAGED ME THIS ON FACEBOOK "Perfect description of those early mornings....I still can smell the fragrance of tomatoes lol.....I drove one of those tractors....liked the article.."
I ASKED BOBBY HOW THE MACHINES REMOVED THE TOMATOES FROM THE VINES SINCE SEXTANT ASKED THAT QUESTION AND BOBBY WAS WONDERFUL ENOUGH TO PROVIDE THE VIDEO BELOW THAT IS PERFECT! THANK YOU BOBBY!
Have you heard about a new campaign headed by the United Farm Workers called the Take Our Jobs Campaign? Due to the current high unemployment rate many are saying that the undocumented workers currently doing farm work are taking jobs away from unemployed Americans. Undocumented workers and the United Farm Workers are inviting Americans to come "Take Our Jobs"!
Well I'll be quite frank...this is one American that doesn't want those jobs. Of course I have a job I love, but if I didn't have a job...I still wouldn't want to work in the fields. I know this from experience.
During my high school years, which was not so long a long time ago; I worked in the fields during the summer months. My dad was a farm foreman for John Elmore Farms in the Imperial Valley and he would have my sister and I, accompanied by my mom work doing various farm labor jobs.One of these jobs was picking tomatoes.
I would get up at the crack of dawn and put on my work clothes. They looked much like the clothing you see on the workers in the photo here. Long sleeve cotton shirts to keep your arms from burning, oldest pair of jeans and shoes and a handkerchief to either wipe away the sweat, cover your mouth to keep from breathing in dirt and bugs or to blow your nose!
My hat of course was much more fashionable than the ball cap the worker is wearing. I had something more befitting my stylish teen sense of fashion. Something more in the range of this hat. In fact almost exactly like this one! All right, so maybe my memory is a little rusty, perhaps it was actually a stylish wide-brim straw hat, but still love the hat in the picture, don't you?
So we would all get in my dad's truck with our thick plastic gloves in hand and head out to the tomato fields.
When we first got there and headed out into the rows upon rows of tomatoes it was actually pretty glorious. The sun was just coming out, the dirt was still moist and smelled of clean wet earth. The air was sweet and cool and it was so delicious to breathe it all in after being cooped up in the classroom for the whole school year. Yes...the early mornings were great!
Ahhh, but the rest of the day...the rest of the day was not so perfect. We each would get two plastic buckets which would probably weigh 50lbs each when filled with green tomatoes. We would head out into the field, hand-pick enough tomatoes to fill both buckets, then we had to carry the buckets; one in each hand (100lbs total) out to the end of the row of tomatoes to the waiting tractors which hauled two trailers each.
The tractor driver who would stand by the trailer would take your buckets and dump them into the trailer. You would then hand him a little card with numbers on it from 1 to 500 and for each two buckets you brought up to him he would take a punch stamp & poke two holes through the numbers. Then back out to the field you would head again. Over and over! At the end of the day you gave the cards with your name on them to your crew pusher who would turn them into the boss and that is how you would get paid.
This was in the Imperial Valley, where on a good day it was under a 100 degrees, but mostly it was 105 to 110 with high humidity. By ten o'clock it was hot, humid, sticky. You were covered with dirt, sweat, bugs and green tomatoes are highly sticky! You would be dead tired from walking in and out of the fields with those buckets of tomatoes, 100lbs at a time. Your back and knees would ache from squatting to pick the tomatoes off the plants. All you wanted was to go home, take a shower, get some sleep then start all over again the next day.
I now remember those days fondly because I was out there in the fields with my mom and my little sister. I got to watch what my dad did as a farm foreman. A lot of the kids I went to high school with were out there working for the summer so we had fun.
But we didn't have to pick tomatoes because our lives and the lives of our children and loved ones depended on it. We didn't have to pick tomatoes to pay the rent. We picked tomatoes as a summer job so that we could see what it was to work hard so we would stay in school and get an education so we would never have to do field work for the rest of our lives.
So yeah, this is one American that doesn't want the undocumented farm workers job. I wonder how many Americans will sign up. I wonder how many realize what a hard, unappreciated job it is to put food on the tables of America.
Our dad was King of the Row Crop. That man could grow anything! When I was just a baby we lived in Arizona where he farmed cotton and hay. Once we moved here to Kern County he farmed lettuce, bell pepper, potatoes, and tomatoes and those are just the things I knew about, I’m sure there were tons of other produce that he farmed that I didn't know about.
