author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

As though to make up for last week, this morning's farm work went a little long. It featured seeds, seeds, and more seeds, seeds of tomato and pepper varieties, seeds to be wet processed for drying, winnowing, and sowing next season.

It began when the farmer, Rich, gave me a broom and said, "Why don't you give each of these seed buckets a good morning stir?" Thus I got my fifteen minutes being a classic Halloween witch, stirring a disgusting cauldron with my (sadly nonmagical) broomstick.

The tomatoes that were harvested a few weeks ago, and the peppers from the week before that, had been collected into buckets according to variety, covered with water, and left, essentially, to rot. Or ferment, I suppose, if you want to be all precise. All I know is that there was a layer of moldy yuck on the surface of each bucket, and as I vigorously stirred them, they released a smell that was part appetizing fruit and partly the sweet stench of decay.

I am constantly grateful for my iron-clad stomach. Not only can I eat darn near anything I want, and in vast quantities, and shortly before a two-hour roller derby practice without getting nauseated during our endurance session, but I also tend not to get queasy at the sight, smell, or thought of various forms of yuck. I'm sure some flaw or other went to pay for that particular merit. I'm guessing several points in gluttony?

But here's the cool thing. Viable seeds sink while immature seeds, fruit pulp, stems and mold all float. This means you can go from a bucket of pink frothy yuck to a window screen full of clean seeds drying in the greenhouse by means of no higher tech than gravity. You add water, you carefully pour off the floating stuff, you repeat until there's no more floating stuff and the seeds are clean. It's kind of amazing.

Eventually those seeds will be dry, and they will be further winnowed by means of an electric fan. You gently sprinkle the seeds from a height, and the fan will blow away the lighter, immature seeds, leaving only the heavier, viable seeds to land in your collection bucket. Simple physics rules the day once more.

After the bucket stirring, I was on pepper seed duty all morning long. I was stationed at the wide-screen prep step of the assembly line. That is, before the fermented mess entered the pour cycle described above, it was poured atop a screen where we smooshed it around with our hands, getting the seeds to fall through and the larger pulp chunks and stems to remain behind. We didn't wear gloves or anything, which might have been a mistake in the case of the huge barrel of Hot Portugals. By lunch time, my hands were well and truly irritated. I won't say they were burning--it wasn't that bad--but they were gently simmering, to be sure. They were also very orange.

Takeaways? First, gravity is kind of awesome. Second, latex gloves are potentially awesome too.

And, despite a long bath, I still smell like hot peppers.