PATTER - Porsche Club Chesapeake Region PCA

First Fruits Farm Tour by Gary and Kara Martinez
Community Service at First Fruits Farm
On September 29th, just prior to the official start of the holiday season, 16 Chesapeake PCA’rs showed up
to volunteer their morning in harvesting vegetable crops from the fields of the First Fruits Farm, a nonprofit
ministry dedicated to growing fresh vegetables for the hungry in Freeland. Founded in 1998, the farm has
grown to over 100 acres of crops ranging from potatoes and sweet corn to kale/collards and green beans.
Using only volunteer labor, FFF has sent over 3.8 million pounds of food (!) to its supported charities, over
20 groups in the greater Baltimore area.
Thus it was that the hardy group of Chesapeake PCA
volunteers gathered early in the dew and mist on
Saturday morning (it is a farm you know) to spend
the day working the fields! Actually to the relief of
everyone, our fearless FFF leader Frank told us we
were only on the hook until noon--the Farm’s way of
making the work fun, which it was, and not
overworking the “city” folk in hopes that they will
return another day.
With a modicum of instruction our assembled team
set off into the cabbage field to harvest “only the
largest heads of cabbage.” And how does one do
that? Well, you guess at which heads are the
largest, keeping in mind that speed and quantity
also count; and then you move (quickly) down the rows and decapitate the selected plants! A lot of fun and
a good way to work off any aggressive tension one might have.
After a short 45 minutes of “harvesting,” during which the team collected over twenty crates of a dozen
cabbage heads each, we were led to another section of the farm to cut and bag kale. In true form, the team
quickly cut and bagged more than enough kale for the farm to send out that day, and we were off on
another adventure.
Arriving at the new field, where other volunteer groups desperately needed our help to bring in the potato
crop, our first chore was to “de-rock” the area of the field that the tractor/plow/potato-digger was to
traverse. This entailed lining up in rows and throwing any exposed or partially exposed rocks larger than a
baseball out of the line of travel of the machinery. What was left unsaid was anyone to the off-field side of
the rock throwers was in mortal danger of being beaned by a hailstorm of rocks flying off the field!
However, being smarter than your average German sports car driver, the Chesapeake volunteers managed
to avoid knocking each other out before getting down to the true potato harvesting task of sorting and
loading the potatoes turned up in the ground by the plow. And after a brief tour in the field, the team, along
with the other volunteer groups had brought in over 18,000 lbs. of potatoes!
The noon break came and having successfully added to the harvest, ten members of the team took
advantage of the incredibly nice day to enjoy lunch together at Shrewsberry Inn, after which three
independent groups extended their volunteer service and delivered heads of cabbage and bags of kale to
charities in Baltimore. It was a very satisfying culmination to a terrific day of community service spent with
fellow Chesapeake PCA’rs. Thanks so much to everyone who joined in!
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