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.