leaving twenty percent

Monday was my first foray into the fields - weeding! Sydney and I spent all day in the lettuce field, with Monica joining us for the morning. Weeding is hard work, of course, and I'm still sore today, but it was a welcome change of pace and scenery. Work in the farm stand is on a whole different order of magnitude from the fields. When afternoon rolls around in the stand, you make a mental list of the dozens of small tasks that need doing before you should let yourself take a sandwich break. In the fields, you wonder if you will get halfway through your task before lunch.

Settling on a "system" for hitting every row is like solving a complex logic puzzle: there is always a more efficient way you haven't thought of yet. We tried you-start-at-that-end-I'll-start-at-this-end, and you-take-that-row-I'll-take-this-row, and you-hoe-I'll-hand... But the best system we found was a sort of leap frog method: Sydney started several feet ahead of me, and when I got to where she started I'd walk down the row to several feet ahead of her. And so on. This was a great method not because of its efficiency, but because the occasional walking down the field felt like progress. 

Despite the heat, the sweat, and the lots and lots of dirt, it was actually a great day. It feels good to clean the rows and liberate the lettuce. I always find it satisfying to pull out a weed, but especially from lettuce. The rows of small heads can look so nice and neat when they are weeded. Weeding brings out the perfectionist in me, which makes it hard to follow Penny's advice of 80%. This is a rule of thumb she taught me on my very first day here: in farming, she says, you aim for 80%. You pull 80% of the weeds. If you spent your time clawing at the last 20% of the weeds, the small ones and the stubborn ones, you'd never get anything done - and on top of that you'd go insane.

This is a Life Lesson of the Week that is probably, actually, a good life lesson to try and learn. Weeding, it turns out, is a great exercise in the art of Leaving Twenty Percent.