Second day in Naples, well, more like second field day in Naples. It was a short day , quote and quote, we only had a few small readings to do. One of them I was asked by The expert, and old-man that has been doing this for years and that I am fortunate to have the chance to have met and learn a thing or two from before he retires on April 2020, to go ahead and do the reading. He said, “Gaby I have been doing this since forever. Why don’t you go ahead and point out what do you see different?”. To which I asked. “Is this a test?” In tone of a joke of course, then he said. “Nope, not a test, we are training you. Go on ahead and if you miss anything, we’ll stop you”. Of course I freaked out inside of me a little (😅). It’s kinda weird when you get put on the spot like that. And of course, I have never done this before, so I wasn’t too afraid to ask as many questions, especially to someone that has so much knowledge.
Anyway, I go on and start reading the plot, looking for subtle differences in the plants 🌱, along with my clicker to keep count of how many I saw. Every time I saw one that I wasn’t sure I’ll point it out and he would tell me whether it was what we were looking for or no. The ones I pointed out that I was sure of them still confirmed with him and I was pretty accurate in my assessment. According to him I didn’t miss one and like I’ve said, the ones that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure we both looked at them just in case.
Then after that the site was having done kind of a field day for other people, business kind of people. I got to meet more people from the company that are usually in different parts of the country and only interact by email. Learned about why they do and how my work and the data I provide affects theirs. Very awesome stuff.
This has been an amazing experience, again, it puts in a different perspective to everything I do from the computer with the data I am provided with. The challenges and complexity of field grow-outs, and the complexity of the vegetables business.
And so, the Naples trip is a wrap. Tomorrow I head back to the 208’s (Idaho). Good I kinda miss my family.
(Side note: At one point during one of our readings, we were looking at some squash plants — zucchini squash. So they [the fruit] are supposed to be yellow, so off types they’d have some green when they aren’t supposed to, like they were starting to turn green. To which I said, “HULK SQUASH” and they didn’t get it (🤦🏻♂️). Sad — a wasted joke (😅).
