Harvest Day

To me harvest days will always be Mondays and Thursdays, torrential rains or excessive heat, six a.m. and the sun just showing up over the fields. It will always remind me of wide brimmed hats and bare feet in the mud and bin after bin full of cucumbers and carrots and kale. Back in New York, I never got to see the pumpkins or the potatoes that we planted in early summer. I fill in the gaps with the farmers market and the fig tree I am desperately trying to keep alive in my apartment, and I thrive in the city knowing that the farm still holds a special place inside me.

This year, the word harvest has new meaning; baking a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin (even though it took four hours and my family hates pumpkin pie), a new appreciation for things that grow. But mostly this year I’m thinking not of what I’ve grown but of how I’ve grown and how I don’t try to define home anymore because I know it can exist in more than one place. It’s the city and the farm and it’s also right here, sitting by the fireplace with my family on Thanksgiving. I like to believe that I’ll somehow end up in the places I’m meant to be, and for now that is enough to feel content. Happy harvest, with many thanks.

A Love Poem

New York City, you have ruined me. Now, wherever I go, my heart beats to the pulse of your traffic, the Hudson flowing through my veins like melted ice cream from the trucks on your every corner. I crave the rumble of your subway beneath my feet, the residue drip from your buildings on the arch of my cheek. In the morning I wake with you wrapped around me. At night you shine brighter than the stars you obscure. You tease me with luxuries you never see through, promises of penthouses and candlelit dinners, and in a storm you toss me to the wind, drop me in puddles that form mercilessly in your potholes, leave me soaking on the corner while your cabs refuse to pause. Yet still I come crawling back to you, stumbling down Broadway as if I could have escaped- the bottoms of my jeans drag in your rain and the bottom of my heart aches for your love.

In Search of Roots

My grandfather says

He'd like to come back as a willow tree

For my sister and me to sit in his shade

He says, it will be enough for him to have lived

All his years for that day

I don't know if I could live as a tree, yes-

I'd like my body to be a home to birds and yes-

I'd be content to change colors each year in the fall but

I'd worry if I were a tree

Since trees can never run away, they stay

Bound by the very source that gives them life.

At least they always know where they came from.

I've been searching for roots, not mine

But the world's, for fruits that don't grow

On shelves in the store and for more shades of blue

Than exist in all five oceans

Did life really begin like my grandfather says

With Adam and Eve

And a snake and a tree? I wonder

If the apple she ate was Macintosh or Granny Smith

And if all the forces of the universe really came together

To bring us where we are today

I think if it were up to me I'd come back as the wind

Strong and free-spirited, nothing to hold me back

I'd travel the world searching for roots and

Everything else

I could find along the way

Brooklyn Botanic

Shady oasis of

Manicured trees

A lavender breeze

Whispers strange sounds

Into urban ears

Painted landscape melody

Hums no music

Just noise

Nothing more than

Look but don’t touch

Sound to drown out

Imperfections

Hidden in the soil

In the corner

A small heart

Slows its pulse

Eyes shift to the

Uniformed man in the

Ink-blue suit

Shrugging his shoulders

In apathetic abandon

Rat poison

He sighs

Eyes that don’t blink

Legs that don’t stand

Wings that don’t fly

The rose garden strangles

A life that once lived

And the sprinklers cry a

Mid-day mist on

A small body laid to rest

In a field of

Poisoned poppies and

Forget-me-nots

What I Miss the Most

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss 5 am. I miss the way the air smells in the morning when the sun is just beginning to break through the clouds. I miss the gardens and the barn and the color of the fields the day after it rains. I even miss my mud-covered jeans and the dirt in the creases of my hands.

I wish I didn't have to leave so soon, but today, as I tried to suppress the urge to pluck weeds out of the flower beds in a shopping center, I realized that the farm is something that will stay with me. Look, swiss chard! I say excitedly to my mom, pointing to a planter outside of a store we are about to go into. I tell her the stems can be hot pink and orange and yellow and purple. I wonder if anyone else passing by realizes how beautiful that is.

Garlic Lovers Unite

When I first heard that over forty people were coming to the farm today to help harvest garlic, I couldn’t understand why. Two days a week the two farmers, two other interns, and I harvest everything we grow on our own. Sure it usually takes over six hours to gather everything together on harvest days, but somehow the five of us always manage to get it done. I came to the garlic harvest today to find out what all the fuss was about.

What I discovered was that the reason the garlic harvest requires so many people is because there are so many steps to the process. First, the garlic needs to be pulled out of the ground, since the bulbs we eat are the root of the plant. The bulbs we pull out are fresh garlic, and can be eaten the way they are. However, dried garlic keeps much longer, and so all of the all of the stems were to be hung to dry from the barn.

In order to do this, we had to first clean all of the bulbs and then tie them together with string in groups of five. When this was done, we loaded all of the bundles onto the pick up truck and drove them over to the barn, where we hung them in rows of laundry lines across the ceiling.

In just a few weeks the garlic will be dried out so we can give it out to our members. Until then, the scent of garlic will remain in the barn. Hopefully, it won’t remain quite as long on me.

Baby Bird

We found this little one outside the barn, sitting in the path of the pick up truck, and moved him to safety in the brush. My first thought was that he came from the speckled eggs in the sweet potatoes. I ran out to check the nest, but there were still just eggs and that black and white mama bird that flaps her wings at me to go away. I hope somewhere near by this bird has a mother just like her.

Perfectly Okay

Sometimes I like to think of the farm as my idea of perfection. I walk down the gravel path to the barn and think that right where I am is the place I’m meant to be, with chickens mulling through the grass and the lazy summer sun lingering westward in the sky. I wonder if anything could be more perfect than mid-July, eggplants and peppers and cherry tomatoes.

Sometimes, though, I’m hit with reminders that the farm is not all juicy strawberries and lavender breezes. Sometimes there are days like today, when I haul endless flats of beans up the hill to the compost pile, flats I spent hours seeding, just because it rained too much this season and there was no time to put them in the ground. And sometimes my skin burns and the mud won’t wash off my hands and there are so many weeds in the lettuce or the celery or the chard that it takes hours to pull them out, and the next day they seem to have sprung up again overnight.

It’s days like this that I realize the farm is not some kind of heaven on earth, that the sun doesn’t shine brighter here than other places, that the chickens don’t lay golden eggs and that the people here are still just people. I guess if perfection was something we strived for, we’d be working towards some unattainable goal. On days like today, the farm to me seems more like the leftover vegetables that nobody wants. They’re placed in a basket in the corner, underneath a painted sign- “Farm seconds: small, bruised, or blemished, but still perfectly okay.”

Confession

I killed a praying mantis.

It was an accident. I was throwing a stray cucumber across the field to one of the other interns, but my throw was way off. When the intern picked up the cucumber, there was the praying mantis, an endangered species, squashed underneath. I think this makes me some kind of criminal.

Urban Agriculture

In the city of Philadelphia, surrounded by asphalt roads and high-rise apartment buildings, is a small square where the sidewalk stops and leads to something unexpected- a farm. I’ve heard the term urban agriculture before, but I’ve never fully grasped the concept until today. Thanks to a group called SAITA (Sustainable Agriculture Internship Training Alliance), I was able to attend a seminar for farming interns at Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia. This farm operates both a green market and CSA, which in this case stands for City Supported Agriculture.

Growing crops in the city requires a kind of innovation and creativity that is difficult to imagine, until you see the hundred foot beds amidst slabs of concrete, where soil has been poured on top of rows of rocks to allow for proper draining. With so little space, every inch of the farm is put to use, with crops even growing on the rooftops of the cooler and the bathroom. The farm also makes use of hydroponics to grow lettuce, which is a technique that adds nutrients to water so that crops can grow without soil.

The market at Greensgrow includes both crops grown on the site and crops imported from local farms in the surrounding area. To reduce emissions from transportation, they have even built a system to produce their own biodiesel fuel from leftover vegetable oil from local restaurants. In this way, city residents can have access not only to a beautiful green space and homegrown crops, but also to locally made meats, cheeses, breads, soaps, and more.

I think something clicked for me today, and I’m so excited I can barely sit still. Urban agriculture combines two of my favorite things, farming and the city, and does so much good for the community and the environment, that I know it is something I want to become involved in. This whole summer I’ve been secretly dreading having to leave the farm to go back to New York, but I’ve already started to do some research, and it turns out there are farms all over the five boroughs. Now I can’t wait to get back so I can visit them and learn more about this new farming technique.

Check out Greensgrow Farm at www.greensgrow.org

Photo Tour

Welcome to the farm!

Out in the field

The barn

Herb Garden



Flower Garden



Chicken Coop



Children's Garden



The Greenhouse, Ripening Blackberries, & the Old Farm House

Fragile Lives

There are little lives beginning everywhere on the farm- watermelons the size of cherries, only a hint of what they will be in just a few weeks, tomatoes that are turning from shades of green to yellow and orange overnight, cucumbers that seem to be growing faster than we can pick them. These little lives are fragile, and they are the ones we work endlessly to save, cultivating and weeding the beds, making sure they have just the right conditions to grow.

There are other little lives on the farm too though, lives that we sometimes overlook along the way. I think those are the ones that showed up today, to say “remember me?” just in case we had forgotten. This morning we found a baby toad in an empty bed. The farmer was shaping the rows with the tractor and we shouted at him to stop so we could chase after the toad to move him to the safety of the blackberry bushes near the pond.

In the afternoon the workshift came to weed sweet potatoes. While the seven of us worked in the beds, a black and white bird sat in between two rows, flapping her wings and screeching loudly. The closer we got to her the more she flapped and screeched, but she wouldn’t fly away. Behind her were three speckled eggs, nestled between two potato plants.

I wanted to tell her that we saw her eggs, that we were not going to hurt them, but she was frustrated and scared. We stayed as far away as we could, but like the mother bird, I too worried about her babies. I worried about what would happen days from now, if one of us, in an effort not to step on potatoes, forgot about the other fragile lives on the farm.

Before I left the sweet potatoes today, I marked the spot near the nest by laying a large stick on the ground. Soon I know the stick will mark, not three little eggs, but three baby birds, and a brave mother who will feed them worms and teach them to fly.

I hope when that day comes, the tomatoes are red and the watermelons are round and ripe. I also hope that on that day, I’ll still be thinking about the other little lives, and how they are just as important to the farm as the crops. But just in case I forget, I’ll look out for little birds flying over the sweet potatoes. That way, I can always have something to help me remember.

Foods of the Fourth

When I think of July fourth food, there’s only one word that comes to mind- barbeque. After all, what is a celebration of our independence without the smell of the grill and the sight of the smokey haze that turns the trees and sky into mere ripples in the background? Like so many holidays, food is not something that happens to be there on the fourth as we celebrate. Instead, the barbeque has become as crucial as the fireworks, as reflective of the fourth of July as Hershey’s on Halloween or the turkey on Thanksgiving.

Somehow though, it seems that the foods we’ve come to associate with the fourth of July are not so fitting with the season, at least in our area. At the farm, the corn and watermelon are waiting for more time in the warmer weather, and so are the potatoes for the potato salad. I love all of these foods, and I’m not saying we won’t have them at our barbeque this year. We’ll pick them up from the supermarket like most other American families, under banners of red, white, and blue that indicate they are the most patriotic choices. And maybe, in some ways, they are. If they can make us feel connected to each other and our country, then more power to them.

But for me, other foods at our barbeque this year somehow feel more American- the grilled zucchini and summer squash, the fresh cucumbers and sugar snap peas, the roasted green peppers and eggplant. True, cooking these foods may not have the same fourth of July quality as shucking ears of corn or spitting our black seeds covered in slimy pink juice, but they are the ones that were grown closest to home, making the best use of the very soil we are celebrating- and really, what could be more American than that?

Dream

These days I don't quite fit in with my mom's clean house. Most of the time I run barefoot through the fields. In the greenhouse, I reach into a bathtub full of soil to fill the seeding flats and when I work out in the beds mud finds its way pretty much everywhere.

Two nights ago I dreamt that my mom disowned me for being too dirty. I was standing outside the house, in my usually muddy state, and she told me I had to find somewhere else to live. But I have nowhere else to go, I cried. She closed the door.

Last night I jolted up at 2:30am to the sound of thunder cracking. I’m an incredibly light sleeper, but I never used to wake up from the soothing sound of thunderstorms. Now I jump up the minute lightening strikes. I guess that’s because the messiest days at the farm are the days when it rains. Whenever I hear storms in the middle of the night, I feel around to remember whether I am outside in the rain or still under the covers of my bed.

With two hours left to sleep last night, I comforted myself with the words of one of the women from yesterday’s workshift. I had told her about my dream, thinking she would find it funny or amusing. Instead, her reply shocked and reassured me. I bet your mom is really proud of you, she said. I squished my toes around in the mud.

I sure hope she’s right.

Confession

I have a slight obsession with vegetables.

On harvest days, I often feel the need to point out the most beautifully colored beets or the largest cucumbers to the farmers or the other interns. “Look at this one!” I’ll say proudly. You’d think after harvesting thousands of vegetables, the excitement would die down. Somehow, it never does.

New York Fairy Tale

Yesterday morning I parked my car at the Trenton Transit Center to catch the next train to New York. I asked the man in the lot how long I could leave my car there. Until twelve, he told me, and in my mind he automatically turned into my fairy godmother saying, “Be home by the stroke of midnight!” I stared at my feet. I was wearing cowboy boots, not glass slippers, and had packed a pair of flip-flops in my bag in case it got too hot. My bag was also full of vegetables from the farm. I was going to visit my former roommate, who is still living in our apartment, and I was bringing them to her for the homemade dinner we had planned to cook.

When I got off the train in the city, the nostalgia hit immediately. I felt that rush of excitement that only New York City brings- the busy sidewalks, the fast pace, the people with purple hair and outrageous outfits. Having been away from the city for so many weeks, I was glad to find it exactly as I left it. Well, almost.

The Calvin Klien billboard on Houston Street has switched from four topless models to a woman in a bikini and the park on Lafayette is nearly finished being constructed. But it wasn’t the physical changes that struck me so much way I fit into the city- Cinderella at the ball, slightly unsure of how things work. I usually give out whatever food I have to the homeless man on the subway, but I wasn’t sure that he would have appreciated the bok choy or hakurei turnips from my bag. And when we sat on a bench eating Pink Berry yogurt on Spring Street, I couldn’t tell if the drops falling on us were from the rain or air conditioner residue.

The thing that I love about New York City though, is that none of this matters. I could have worn my farming hat and ripped jeans around the village, and no one would have looked at me any differently. It’s that nonjudgmental quality that I love the most, and as we sat in the apartment, eating sautéed Chinese cabbage and sugar snap peas, I thought about my two worlds, the city and the farm, and liked that I could have a little bit of both.

When the clock struck nine I knew I had to be on my way back to the train station to make it to my car in time. It felt early and I wasn’t ready to leave one home for the other quite yet. But I didn’t want my car to turn into a pumpkin (as much as I love pumpkins), and so I took the familiar route- BDF train to West Fourth Street, ACE to Penn Station, and before I knew it the bright lights of the ball faded into the distance.

When I got home, I took off my boots and emptied my bag; out came the book I brought for the train, my wallet, my cell phone. But as I fished around the bottom, I realized that something was missing. I left my flip-flops in the apartment.

At least I won’t have to wait around for prince charming to bring them back. Instead it looks like another trip to the city will be in my near future, and for me that will be just fine.

Plans

Today marks the end of my fifth week at the farm, half way through the ten weeks I was planning to work there. Already, I'm starting to think of ways it won't have to end. The cucumbers and summer squash that we transplanted on my first week were ready to be harvested for the first time today, and the tomatoes and peppers are not far behind. I can barely stand the thought of having to leave as the blackberries ripen, especially knowing I will miss the pumpkins and potatoes completely in the fall.

I told the farmers that maybe, instead of taking August off, I can just cut back to part time until I have to leave for New York. Then once school starts, I'm thinking I can come back whenever I'm home for long weekends or holidays. But the crops will die come winter break, and I hate planning what I'm going to eat for breakfast in the morning, let alone planning what I'll be doing come the spring. Somehow though, I can't seem to stop planning ways I can come back to farming when I graduate college. I guess it's the thought of forever leaving this place in the past that makes me desperate to work it into the future. That, or picking too many cucumbers (753!) has made me go slightly insane.

Vegetarian's Dilemma

I’ve been a vegetarian for over two years. I cut meat out of my diet the day I learned about the treatment of animals on factory farms and never looked back. However, the problems with the meat industry in our country go far beyond cruelty to animals. From a health perspective, industrially produced meat is packed with antibiotics, hormones, and other harmful chemicals. Environmentally, avoiding industrial meat reduces energy consumption and greenhouse gas pollution.

My view on vegetarianism has always been that, in a society where people treated animals, human health, and the environment with respect, I would eat meat. After all, humans, by nature, are omnivores. If this is my view, shouldn’t that mean that I would eat meat if it was produced under these stipulations? I can’t give you a reason why I don’t eat this kind of meat, but it never used to concern me. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to see my vegetarianism as a bit hypocritical. Michael Pollan sums up the problem with vegetarianism in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it’s gotten me thinking. Here’s a brief and nerdy summary of my newly forming thoughts on the issue:

The truth is that in a natural ecosystem, predator and prey balance each other out. Without prey for food, predators would die of starvation. Without predators, prey would become over-populated, run out of food, and thus, also die of starvation. If nature provides this perfect balance, it seems that the right thing to do, as human beings, is to fulfill our role as the predator. By eating local meat, we are also reducing the energy costs of importing protein that we need from other places.

I’ve been telling myself lately that, if given the opportunity to eat local, organic, and ethically produced meat, I would do it. I’ve been telling myself lies. Today, a CSA member and I got into a discussion about local meat. It just so happens that this CSA member buys lamb from a local organic farm and cooks it with mushrooms that he gathers himself, along with fresh veggies from the farm. It also just so happens that tomorrow night is the June potluck and that this member is planning to prepare this dish to bring along. Here is my chance.

The problem is that I know if I go to tomorrow’s potluck, I will avoid the lamb. When I think about lamb dinner, I can’t not picture a baby sheep. And when I picture a baby sheep, my natural omnivore instincts go out the window, because the last thing I want to do to that baby sheep is eat it. I can’t believe I just wrote that. When people ask me why I won’t eat lamb, I refuse to tell them it’s because I think lambs are cute. Michael Pollan would be ashamed.

How can it be that all of my sophisticated thoughts on meat-eating boil down to this?

Well, all I can say for myself is that at least those more complex thoughts exist. For now, that will have to be enough- and so will the vegetarian options at tomorrow’s potluck dinner.

Turnips, Cabbage, Mulberries

Take a look at some crops from our harvest, plus my stylish new farming hat! Now if only the sun would come out so I can actually wear it.

Dream

On Tuesday afternoon it took over an hour to transplant one row of leaks. I was burning up with fever and barely had enough energy to push the plants far enough into the ground. I left early without making sure they were okay.

Last night I fell asleep to the sound of rain pounding the roof, and I dreamt that the leaks we planted started to turn grey. I was afraid I had ruined them and was running up and down the row trying the push them back in the ground, but they weren’t dying. Instead, they were growing too fast. The stems grew until they were taller than me, taller than the barn and the trees, and kept on growing until they weren’t leaks anymore but buildings.

I stood there and watched as the farm turned into New York City, my beloved city, that I love and miss. Normally I love when Manhattan appears in my dreams, but this time I woke up sweaty and crying. I wasn’t sure if it was from a fever or a nightmare. I think maybe it was a little of both.

Sick

In bed sick and the only thing I can think of is how bad I feel that I'm missing the Wednesday workshift tomorrow and possibly Thursday's harvest. Maybe there really is something wrong with me...

Fiddle-Dee-Dee

So I can’t stop picturing that scene from Gone With the Wind where Rhett figures out that Scarlet is lying to him about the success of her plantation. Just by looking at her hands he can tell that she has been out working in the fields and that she is acting like everything is okay to cover up the fact that she is only after his money- anything to save her beloved plantation, Tara.

Well, Rhett Butler, I guess you’d see right through me too. These are not “the hands of a lady.”  These hands are scraped and tan, and mud is so stubbornly embedded in the pores that even when I scrub at them it refuses to budge. They are aching and tired, and for now, they’re ready to go to sleep until tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.

If Kale Could Talk

If kale could talk, it would tell you how it grows in six neat rows in the back of the field on the farm. It would tell you how it’s best when eaten the day it’s picked, sautéed in olive oil or raw in salads. But mostly, it would tell you the story of the women who came to work at the farm today. It would tell you the story of two breast cancer survivors, one who relapsed twice after she thought she was cured. It would tell you about a painter who taught English in Thailand during the War in Vietnam and about an environmental lawyer raising a four-year-old son.

Wednesdays are workshift days at the farm. Every Wednesday, six CSA members sign up to complete two of their volunteer hours. Today, I pulled weeds in the kale bed along with the women who signed up. Today, what we didn’t know was that as we worked on our hands and knees in the mud, a man was shot at the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington D.C. And as the painter told us about the day she heard Dr. Martin Luther King give a speech about freedom, we were unaware that a white supremacist was being rushed to the hospital, so that doctors could work to revive him, after he took the life of an innocent man.

Working in the kale, these women exchanged stories of the things that had made them strong. The lawyer talked about her struggle to earn equality in a workforce dominated by men. The breast cancer survivor who relapsed twice talked about her fight through chemotherapy and radiation, proudly cancer-free since the year 2000. I don’t want to say I’m happy I had cancer, she said. She was glad, though, that something had come along that made her rethink her life, something that made her realize what was truly important.

It was their life experiences, I thought, that made them strong. I was the youngest in the group, and I secretly wished for a day when I would have more life experiences to share. But there was something about them that let me know that experience alone is not what gives people strength. There was a certain passion for life that they possessed, a passion that couldn’t be marked by time. The murderer at the museum was eighty-eight years old.

After two hours, the environmental lawyer stood up and looked at the three beds we weeded. The kale stood out neatly where we had worked. We covered a lot of ground, she said, and we smiled. She wasn’t talking about the kale.

Strawberry Fields Forever

Where else can you pick them right off the bush on your lunch break?

Grey Skies

Today it rained and water soaked my skin. We spent the morning harvesting for the afternoon member pick-up and after lunch I planted chives and sorrel in the herb garden. My hands were numb and my goulashes were covered in mud and by the time I left the farm at five the rain was still falling from the sky. I never appreciated a shower and a cup of tea this much.

Dandelion Wishes

Cultivating spinach is sort of like picking a flower, only not just one flower but thousands, and not flowers but weeds. Since herbicides aren’t used on organic farms, all weeds need to be pulled out by hand or hoe. This week I cultivated two 350 foot-long spinach beds, and halfway through I picked a dandelion so I could blow its seeds into the wind and make a wish. I stopped believing in dandelion wishes when I stopped believing in the tooth fairy, but I like to think that one day one lucky dandelion will be the one to work. I was tired and I wanted to wish that all of the weeds in the world would disappear forever, but I quickly changed my mind. I remembered something I once heard, that weeds are only weeds until we find a use for them, and I thought of a world in which little girls never knew the glow of buttercups under their chins. But mostly, I changed my mind so I could keep wishing. If this one came true, there would be no more dandelions left to wish on again.

Luck

I’ve never had much luck in the kitchen. College meals consist of peanut butter sandwiches and bowls of oatmeal, and cooking does not go far beyond the occasional omelet or scrambled egg. It doesn’t surprise me that potlucks have the name that they do. It would take a stroke of luck for me to be able to create a meal worth sharing with others.

Tonight was the monthly member potluck at the farm. Luckily though, I didn’t need to worry about coming up with a recipe, since my mom happens to be one of the greatest cooks I know. I spent the morning in the kitchen with her, closely following every direction she gave me, until a few hours later we pulled eggplant rollatini hot from the oven, ready to bring to the farm.

At the potluck tonight I sat next to a woman who told me about her father, her inspiration. This man traveled to nearly every country in the world, paid by a magazine to write about his passion, fishing. Figure out what you love to do, this woman said, then find someone to pay you to do it. We ate strawberry rhubarb and drank lemonade, listening to a man strum his guitar as children painted a tree stump and the sun colored the sky pink. I sat on the picnic bench thinking about luck and wondering if there was someone in the world who would pay me to stay right here forever.

Transplant

I can already tell that one of the best parts of working on the farm this summer is going to be getting to know the members who come by each week. The farm is a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. This means that rather than selling the crops we grow, we divide our harvest amongst our members. Buying a membership commits people to four to eight hours of work on the farm per season, in exchange for this weekly supply.

After meeting many of the members this week, the one I can't get out of my head is an older woman. She held lettuce in her hand like fragile china and swore to me that her mother had cured herself of cancer by switching to a local organic diet. Thinking about this woman while working in the fields today, I realized it seems only right that the act of placing the seedlings into the earth should have the same name as a medical procedure that saves lives- the transplant.

A quick farming lesson: For most of the crops at the farm, we do not plant the seeds directly into the ground. Instead, we grow the seeds in a greenhouse until they have grown strong enough to survive on their own. Then we move them to outdoor beds. This is called transplanting.

Today we transplanted summer squash and cucumbers. Sitting on a seat attached to the back of a biodiesel-run tractor, I lowered plants into the ground as the tractor slowly traveled across the row, leaving small holes in the soil. Afterwards we laid straw around the rows to prevent weeds from growing. We finally finished at 6pm, the sun just beginning to set in the sky. After all that work, I hope those little plants rest soundly in their beds tonight. I know I will rest soundly in mine.

Reflections on Radishes

Today I learned the wonder of pulling a radish from the ground. It was not only my first day at the farm but also the first day of the summer harvest. We picked bok choy and broccoli rabe, lettuce and mizuna. But picking a radish is not like picking a leafy green. There is nothing like the surprise of pulling a radish root from the ground, each one extraordinarily different from the last.

At first I didn’t understand how each radish could look so different. I kept asking, "Should I throw this one away?" This one’s too white, I thought, this one’s too small. What I didn’t know was that radishes can be any shade, from pearly white to deep red to bright magenta, and any size from that of a quarter to that of a golf ball, and that this matters not in the least. Even though they look different, each one is just as good as the last. I think the world would be better if we could live like radishes, peaceful amongst such diverse neighbors.

I used to pick sliced radishes out of pre-made salads and toss them to the side of my plate. When they’ve already been picked and sliced for you, you only think to judge them on taste. Now when I see them in my salad, I will remember the surprise of pulling them from the ground and think of radishes in a new way- a little bitter, but mostly sweet.

Potted Plant Lament

My Gerber daisy plant was the first to go. It was a red daisy in a red pot, the happiest looking flower I'd ever seen. It wilted in my apartment two days after my mom gave it to me. I kept thinking maybe it would perk up. Three days later the wilted daisy turned from red to brown. Gerber daisies are hard to keep, said my mom, try violets. The violets died within the week.

Over winter break my mom bought me an aloe plant to take back to New York. Aloe grows in the desert, so naturally it needs very little water. Even still, days after I took it back to my apartment the leaves started to droop. The only reason the plant survived until the spring was because my friend and designated plant-caretaker Michelle lives only six floors below me. Good thing too, because the aloe gel came in handy two weeks before school let out. (Note to self: Wear sunscreen to sit by Hudson River. Water reflects sunlight.)

When the farmer asked me why I wanted to work on his farm this summer, I told him I'm an Environmental Studies major at NYU, and I’m interested in sustainable agriculture. He asked if I had any experience with farming. I told him I worked in a soup kitchen once, which isn’t exactly a farm, but at least it was food-related. You’re hired, he said.

New York City is only two hours away but it is as far from the farm as possible. When I visited the farm for the first time, the farmer commented on how the transition from the city might be difficult. Now it's only two days until I start working there, and I can’t stop wondering if I’ll be able to love both places, even though they’re opposites. Maybe that’s a contradiction. But then again, so is a farming intern who can’t grow a potted plant.