Hello everyone at Ogallala, its Jon Baros back again, for the very last time to tell you about some of my experiences while I was doing my internship at the Pueblo of Pojoaque Agriculture Program. I have to first start off by saying that I really enjoyed working with my aunt Frances, Dario , Francine and Herbey . They’re all really smart people in there own unique way and I can honestly say that I have learned a lot from the four of them this last summer. It was an awesome experience. Some of the things that we were working on were the two hoop houses that I mentioned in my other blogs, and after those were done it was time to plant. So I got to see pretty much the whole process from when Dario and Herbey started plowing and tilling the fields to now that all the plants are starting to freeze.
One of the things that I didn’t really enjoyed was helping Dario, Herbey and my aunt Frances plant and maintain twelve thousand onions. It felt like the rows were endless but in the end we pulled every weed and the onions did really good. Another thing that was a bummer happened when we almost lost our 10 acres of blue corn, which we worked so hard to grow. We had no water for almost a month because the person in charge of the water was caught stealing it to water his grass and the neighboring pueblo that we get the water from cut off everyone. Having to watch the blue corn plants dry up after we had worked so hard irrigating it, was horrible. It made me very mad and it also helped me to realize that water is more important than I ever knew, and when people start fighting over it no one wins. Not all of the blue corn we planted died, but a big portion of it did .
In the end everything turned out good, all the other crops did good because we have a holding tank for water that we used to irrigate them. We grew a lot of basil, onions, tomatoes and cucumbers that we sold at the local farmers market. We also sold to our
casino restaurants. It was all a lot of fun I want to thank everyone at Ogallala for giving me this opportunity and for helping me log on to the portals in the beginning when I was having trouble.
