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