Farming is different in the rain. On the one hand, it is easier to pull out weeds with roots the size of wrists because the soil is loosened and moist. After attacking rows of chinese broccoli, onions, squash and lettuce, I know how much anger to put into each heave. For chickweed--"the devil" as Lyn calls it--which is relatively thin-stemmed and sprawling, like a net that covers everything but avoids rooting too deeply in one place, it takes relatively little-strength, but a lot of entangling. Usually it is machete-d. Thistles are pretty bad, and they're everywhere in the greenhouses, thriving in the humidity, stubborn and with long roots, horizontal at the tips so that just when you think you've got it all, you realize they're broken. C'est la vie. 

The rain also brings the dance of when to leave the greenhouses and try to dash into the fields for transplanting (in our case, tomatoes, amarynth, sunflowers). Just as the plastic cartons of seedlings are under-arm, the wheel-contraption-for-creating-rows in tow (it has a fancy name that I cannot remember), the sky lets loose in great shaking sheets of water and we are forced to retreat to weeding in the greenhouse.

"It is like Honduras, these flash rainstorms," says Juvencio, shaking his head. On the upside, in the last week many of the plants outside have sprouted into awkwardly leaning and leggy teenagers. 

I am finally gaining the skills so I can work on the farm less as a follower and more as an independent, and yesterday I was trusted to seed a row of carrots with the push-seeder all by myself, gathering the equipment and working solo in the greenhouse. It was a little step that felt like progress.

I keep thinking about what Chris Eden's farmer mentor, Florence said to us last week about the social stigma of farming. When people ask her her profession, she feels the need to supplement "farming" with the fact that she has a college degree, to be intellectual in conversation, to validate herself as someone with more than dirty fingernails and a farmer's tan. America does not value the food producers the way it might. The people I am encountering deserve as much recognition for the depth of their art as do the chefs and the radio show producers and the orthopedic surgeons and the editors. 

"If you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, nobody says a farmer," says Juvencio. "That's what I said," he adds with a smile. 

My cuticles are peeling and blood-stained, my nails have grown ridges and are peeling and torn. But after every day, I am content. And so in that way, what more can I really ask for?