August 6, 2008
Whew! It seems I blinked and July whizzed by. I guess that’s just what happens when the days heat up, the produce starts rolling in, and it’s all you can do to climb into bed at night after a long day at work. There are plenty of things to write about, but I’ve been asked to address what happens with our produce when there’s leftover food. My answer: what leftover food?
As a new farm, we are working hard to get our scale right. This year, we have 16 CSA members, a small farm stand, and one wholesale customer. Because our distribution is quite small, we have tailored our planting and harvesting to approximate, as closely as possible, the amount of produce we need to pick in order to avoid having extra. Sure, occasionally a shareholder won’t show or a particular customer won’t want a given herb or type of produce, but then we, the hungry farmers and avid cooks, gather up the scraps of the pickup and take it home to our own kitchen to feed ourselves.
Guessing how much to grow and harvest is always a bit of a crapshoot. How does a farmer avoid drastically underestimating, and thus running out of food, or over-harvesting and wasting money and time by letting extra produce go to the compost pile? It’s a tricky science, one that takes a lot of practice and experimentation to get right. This year, my bosses had the good fortune to be able to borrow the crop plans of farmer friends of theirs, thus helping them to plant to their scale based on Town Farm’s number of shareholders. So far, we’ve done pretty well. But there are inevitably variables that we just can’t predict - rain, drought, rot, poor germination, slow growth, etc. We do all we can to manipulate these unhelpful problems by fertilizing, hoeing and weeding, and covering crops during extreme weather, but sometimes crops just aren’t ready when, or in the quantity, that we need them. For example, this past week, a planting of cilantro that we were counting on to get us through two or three weeks of pickups only yielded enough for one single day, only a sixth of its expected yield. Alas, no cilantro for a week or so now, until our next planting is big enough to be viable for harvest.
Not all farms, of course, operate on such small numbers as we do. The farm I worked at last year, for example, used its 9 acres quite intensely, and grew for 300 shareholders and hunger relief donations. Our method was to estimate the number of shareholders that would show on any given day (experience helped us predict patters, but there were always surprises- the shareholders has the chance to show up on any of three days of every week), and harvest that many shares. Sometimes we ran low and had to do emergency harvests late in the evening, other times we way over-guessed. In those cases, the extra was packed into crates and picked up by various hunger-relief charities that counted on us to provide them with produce for their food supplies.
In coming seasons, Town Farm may have to adopt a similar model. Next year, my bosses are planning to offer 75 shares, as well as expanding their wholesale operation and selling at a brand new farmers market. Guessing numbers becomes harder as the numbers go up, and how much to bring to market? One never knows.
But in the meantime, yours truly has the opportunity to keep her fridge full with fresh food largely due to a slight overplanting, imperfect plants (I don’t mind split carrots or tomatoes with a tiny rot spot), or no-show shareholders. No waste, and a beautifully varied and nutritious diet.
To find your local food bank, go to: America's Second Harvest
July 7
I’ve been thinking lately about what it is that draws me to farming, what makes me believe I’m suited for it. There are societal reasons of course, but I’m not the sort to make a lifestyle choice based around a strong philosophical conviction. What I’ve come to love is farming’s ability to give you space. Space to think, space to breathe, space to move and be restless and be restful. Space.
Let’s backtrack. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to farm. In fact, the first farm job I had terrified me. I had been drawn to the farm because of the non-profit that owned and directed their mission. Hunger relief and community health were at the center of this farm’s workings, and I gravitated towards the combination of public service and physical work. But mostly, I thought, the physical work of farming would just give me the credibility to call myself part of the non-profit side of the operation. I applied to many other jobs, actually, thinking that working at a farm might be a bit too laborious and a bit too socially isolating (I would be a member of a very small farm crew, after all) for my taste. But all my other options fell through, and upon arriving back from a stint in South Africa, I began at the farm.
Although I had believed I would be very involved with the office workings of the farm, it quickly became evident to me that I was going to be in the fields all day every day. More surprising was that I realized just as quickly that I had no desire to be in the office, and loved my time outside. I was sweaty and grimy, making more mistakes than I’d like to admit, and really connecting with my handful of co-workers.
Idealism, you say. It’ll never last. Listen, I’ve tried having office jobs. No, to be fair, I’ve tried office internships (I’ve never lasted longer than a few months). It doesn’t take long for me to feel my life energy draining out of me and into the isolation of only communicating with a computer for hours on end. It just doesn’t jive. Everything that I love about farming is absolutely absent in the other jobs I’ve tried.
On the farm, you have to be self-directed. No one can make you hoe faster or harvest more quickly except yourself. There are no promotions to entice you to put in longer hours. It’s just you and the plants and the open air.
People-wise, farming is a wonderful synthesis of group work and solitary time. I find I do my best thinking at work. Something about having my hands busy in the soil or splashing around in the water after harvest liberates my mind. I’ve had thoughts that border on revelation at work after long, lonely hours. And yet I’ve had some of the most thought-provoking and personal conversations of my life while harvesting, seeding, and washing.
This is true even within the larger farming community. There is a sort of camaraderie that emerges from sharing in the kind of work that really demands of you your energy and strength, a work that is at once tedious and immensely gratifying, humble and remarkably beautiful.
If I wake up restless one morning, full of agitation and energy, I can harness that sensation into my day’s work. There’s nothing like hauling bales of hay for mulch or pounding tomato stakes into compacted earth to rid you of your antsiness. Or if I come to work emotionally fried, needing to rest, I find solace in the rhythms and repetition of the work. There’s no need to impress, just to go through the motions, to care for the plants, be outdoors. To some manual work may not seem like rest, but to anyone who’s ever taken comfort in gardening, a hike, or a swim, they understand. There’s a sense of holistic rejuvenation in the work on a farm, a sense of cycle and rebirth, of need and fulfillment, of simplicity.
And then there are the more obvious perks. I get to distribute and eat beautiful food that I’ve helped to nurture, from seed to harvest. There is no pretense to my work- I wake up every morning and throw on yesterday’s dirty tank top and dust-encrusted hiking pants. And the concept of needing to set aside time for exercise is foreign to me during the season; I spend my day physically exhausting myself rather than restlessly toe-tapping under my desk.
I am awake to see the sun climb up over the trees to pain their tops fiery pink. I breathe fresh air. The weather dictates my work. I feel the rain on my back while I crawl along weeding and the mid-afternoon sun as my workdays near their end.
I may not be able to sustain a lifetime of full-time farming, I’ve already admitted that to myself. But until I figure out if any other career can afford me the sense of freedom and space that farming offers, I’ll wake with the work of the fields in my hands and my head, reveling in the life it allows me to live.
June 23, 2008
The dry season should be looming. As the weather heats up, new farmers scramble to make sure they have a watering system in place in preparation for the summer, the time of year when the crops come on fast and furious but demand a tremendous amount of water given the beating sun and long hours of daylight. We’ve had our drip lines set up for irrigation for close to a month now, flat black plastic tubing dotted with tiny holes which permit water to drip right onto the roots of the plants, a much more water efficient way to irrigate than sprinklers, which water beds and pathways indiscriminately. But our drip has been off for the past few weeks due to unusually wet weather.
In many ways, the heavy rains that have settled into the Pioneer Valley in recent weeks are a blessing. Surrounding a wretched heat wave, the storms have prevented the plants from becoming parched or stunted and the soil from becoming dust under our boots. But holds on our plans to get into the fields during this busy time of year have arisen as a result of this unseasonably wet weather.
There are few jobs in this day and age that revolve around the weather. Sure, the schoolteacher in the colder parts of the country gets an occasional snowday. And I suppose the opposite is true, that plow drivers kick into high gear during snow season. But for the most part, careers and work schedules are unaffected by temperature and precipitations. Farming is not such a profession.
The ground is soaking wet. Pick up a handful of soil today and it will form, almost without coaxing, a dense ball of mud. This means that many of the farm tasks that demand attention between the set days of harvests and markets cannot be done. Hoeing, for example, comes to a standstill when the ground is wet. Try running a scuffle hoe through muddy soil, and you’ll have little luck cutting and upturning the lambs quarter and pursulane growing among the crops. But more importantly, try to do any sort of weed-controlling farm work when the ground is wet and you’ll create a worse weed problem. You see, the concept of handweeding and hoeing is threefold- to aerate the soil, to remove the weeds from around the crops, and to upturn their roots so the sun shrivels them up and prevents the little buggers from re-rooting in the beds. But when there’s excessive moisture in the dirt, little uprooted weeds lying on the soil have a good chance of wheedling their way back into the ground before the soil dries out.
I was reminded this week of how rain is just one more factor that makes farming an unusual occupation. Farmers have to work around the weather, often working longer days when the weather is prime, and impatiently (although sometimes gratefully, for the unexpected day of rest) waiting until the soil dries out enough to let the hoes, plows, and tillers to get back in action.
A mixed summer blessing, this rain seems to be. Mother nature is flexing her annual muscle, proving to farmers that there will always be climatic constraints to how fast and how efficiently they can work, and reminding them that setting a fixed schedule is merely a silly notion (clearly created by the non-farming majority). In a few weeks, we may be crying out for rain amid a drought or heat wave. But for now, our agendas have been thwarted. It must’ve been farmers who coined that famous “The best laid plans…” quote.
by Sara Franklin
June 12, 2008
I’ve been thinking a lot about neighbors, friends, and communities lately. Moving to a new place where you know nobody at all has a way of making one reflect on such things. But more than anything, it’s a neighbor we have at NoHo Town Farm that’s made me contemplate.
For the sake of this entry, I’m going to call him Hal. Hal is a Northampton old-timer. He grew up in a house right across the street from our little farm, and remembers NoHo’s agricultural heyday. Watching the fields across the street be mowed, plowed, and tilled drew him over to Ben and Oona last summer, and now, it seems, we’ve earned ourselves an honorary crew member.
It’s always something. More often than not, I arrive in the morning to see Hal and Ben talking, leaning against one of their pickups casually, exchanging stories, information, and laughs. Or sometimes they’re bent over one of our temperamental Farmall tractors, trying to figure out exactly what isn’t working that particular day. Hal always seems to have an idea.
When I began at NoHo Town Farm, I thought perhaps Hal was just helping us get through the muddy spring. He was around an awful lot, acting as an unofficial consultant for our myriad of infrastructural projects. But it soon became clear that Hal was going to be a mainstay. And ever since, his presence has only increased.
Sometimes Hal comes just to chat while we weed endless rows on our knees. Other times he shows up with gifts, ranging from ample bunches of wild asparagus from his fallow fields in the meadows of NoHo to handmade weeding tools made out of secondhand steak knives. More often than not, he’s got advice on the weather to offer as well. This makes for amusing conversation between he and Oona, who has recently become obsessed with the local radar weather forecaster. They argue good-naturedly about whether rain will come by week’s end and whether or not the severe weather warnings (read: tornadoes and golf ball-sized hail) will pertain to us. One recent day during an extreme heatwave, Hal spent the morning in our shady CSA shed, shirt unbuttoned, just passing the time. All of us were prolonging our morning slowness, wary of the hazy heat that promised midday highs of 100 degrees. But Hal just sat, happy to be in good company, encouraging us to take a dip in the Mill River during our lunch break. “You must!” he hollered in his rusty drawl.
I’ve never had a neighbor like Hal. And although I don’t live on the farm, he feels like he’s always just around the corner. He’s always ready with a treat at the end of a sweaty and exhausting day or when we’ve just about given up on using the Cub to mark beds because it’s refusing to behave yet again. In my suburban upbringing, we barely knew our neighbors. We smiled at them, sure, but we all went home to our cozy homes at night, content in our little self-absorbed worlds.
Farming, I’ve come to realize, has a way of bringing out the community member in people. For Hal, maybe it’s because he remembers what it was like growing up in a farming family where farmers relied upon one another to get by. Few farmers can afford all the advice, supplies, and manpower they need. A mutual exchange of manpower and free consultation was necessary to get through the season with a successful harvest. Or maybe he’s just lonely. Who knows. But his kindness is touching and utterly unique. So for the first time in my life, I’ve got a neighbor, and even the seeds of a community. Now, to find a way to pay it forward.
Ah, harvest season. Finally, after months of slinking into markets to pay ever-rising prices for organic greens, I can relax and just pick them! I tell you, there’s nothing like the first head of lettuce of the season. Tender and flavorful, these leaves are a far cry from the bland and limp bundles that have been shipped across the country. As I crunched through my first farm-fresh salad of the season, I found myself thinking about how easy my access to delicious food become when the growing season kicks into full gear. And man, as a foodie, do I appreciate the taste difference in this gorgeous produce. But after an especially hot day this past week, I began to reconsider that floating feeling.
Easy? Not so fast, Sara. Yes, by harvesting most of my summer and fall produce from the farm, I’ll be saving myself hundreds of dollars in grocery bills and also decrease the number of food shopping trips I have to make (a blessing given the recent spike in gas prices). But the ease of snipping off green leaves at then end of a workday and knowing I’ll have enough veggies for two days is awfully deceiving. What I save in money and mileage, I began to think, I pay for in other ways. Primarily, lifestyle.
After a year of being involved in farming, I still get the funny looks. “You’re doing WHAT?” Especially at my recent college graduation- you should’ve seen the jaws drop on my friends’ parents. My skin has thickened up to the raised eyebrows and the confusion about what exactly farming entails (my, how far we’ve gotten, as a nation, from understanding that it’s farmers, somewhere, who produce our food). But what I’m just getting used to is stomaching the reality myself.
I don’t make much. This isn’t for lack of hard work, and it’s not for lack of generosity on my bosses’ part. It’s just that small-scale organic farming doesn’t net much. Now, I’m not whining. I know I made a choice to farm, and every time I get up and throw on dirty jeans and a tank top or step out into a bed of seedlings on a clear morning, I remember why. Farming is certainly work (and hard work at that), but it’s not the kind of occupation that I’ve realized I dread- sitting in front of a computer (she says as she types away), locked inside, disconnected from all that’s going on outside in the real “real world”. But when it comes time to check my bank balance, or even do the grocery shopping, I remember that my choices have real implications on the way I’m able to live my life outside of work.
Recently, I’ve been feeling the pinch in all sorts of places, driving my boyfriend crazy with keeping track of receipts and reaching over to turn off the car as soon as he shifts into park. There are, of course, the costs that most people, worldwide, are confronting more and more these days- food and gas. We’re big eaters in my house (it comes with the territory- you work growing food, you want to eat food; you spend the day hoeing, you’re starving by dinnertime), and aren’t planning on going on a permanent diet anytime soon. But, we’ve surely made changes in the way we shop and how we consume- we even tried going off ice cream for a month (that lasted less than a week, we’re shameless addicts). And alas, the cost of butter is hindering my pie-making habit. Where I used to generously roll out crusts and give pies away freely to my friends and co-workers, I now find myself thinking twice before even making dessert for my home.
You may just be thinking I’m a junk food junkie, but it’s these corners of my life (and checkbook) that I never thought twice about before that are taking up brainspace these days. Some days I’m a grouch, wishing I had the salary of a paralegal or a Teach for America volunteer, some of the professions my friends have jumped into right out of school. But then I remember the simple pleasures and valuable lessons that are coming out of my choice to farm.
I’ve begun getting to work via a combination of bike and bus. She’s so eco-conscious, all the readers say! Well, yes and now. This all started because of rising gas prices, not a commitment to combat global warming. My commute to work is a stop-and-go 7 ½ mile trip which was eating through the gas, even in my relatively fuel-efficient little Prizm, at eye-popping and bank-breaking speed. So I started, one day a week, now more and more. My commute is 40 minutes longer than it was when I was driving, but I now get to relax in the mornings and afternoons, reading the New York Times and novels, feeling like I’m reclaiming some of the time I’d otherwise spend cursing out my window in traffic. By way of healthcare, I’ve been learning to navigate the new government-provided healthcare system in Massachusetts, since I now live well below the federal poverty line. After four years of studying health disparities and talking about the difficulty of access, I now understand. And even my leisure time is different-I’m spending almost all my time outside, walking my dog and taking notice of my community. I’ve been cooking with my boyfriend and with friends more and more, exchanging recipes and conversing as we prep, cook, and linger over meals. I’ve even found a local yoga studio that’s willing to let me pay for classes with farm vegetables.
Conclusion? I don’t have one yet. Whether or not I’ll farm for the rest of my life remains to be seen, but I find that there are real perks to the “entry level” career decision I’ve made, even if it doesn’t come with an enticing salary. Through farming I continue to build community, focus on priorities in my life, and consider the value of purchases and expenses. And on some fronts, I’m sure that I have it better than even the mega rich who can afford to stock their kitchens entirely with Whole Foods wares- I’ve got those gorgeous and tasty heads of lettuce fresh from the fields to prove it.
by Sara Franklin
Sweaty season began last week. I’m not talking beads on the forehead or a slight dampness on the lower back; I’m talking full-on streams running down from under your straw hat and a big ‘ol wet patch in the center of your back, sticky jeans and humidity so intense you can’t bear to keep your Wellies on your feet. For farmers, sweaty season begins not when the temperatures reach up into the high eighties and everyone’s sitting out on their shaded porches sipping cold drinks, but instead when the spring surprises you with an unusually warm day in the mid-seventies and you’re overdressed and working your tail off.
For century upon century, farmers have racked their brains to come up with labor- and time-saving tools. Farming means long, hard, sweaty days regardless of how you do it, but minimizing the necessary output of energy can help preserve some semblance of farmers’ energy and, on blazing hot days in the height of the season, their sanity.
Last week, it was time to plant potatoes. Ben and Oona had borrowed a tractor implement from a farmer friend of theirs, a tool which creates a trench in which to plant seed potatoes. But, after fiddling with the hitch for a while, Ben declared that the implement wasn’t going to fit onto our tractor, and we were just going to have to do the work by hand. Drat. It was mid-afternoon, the temperature had climbed into the high seventies, and the sun was blazing down on the crew, all of us overdressed for the unseasonably warm day.
We took turns chopping seed potatoes, careful to preserve at least one eye on each chunk so that the seed could germinate. While some of us chopped, the rest carried heavy-duty garden hoes out into the freshly tilled rows to dig our 4-6 inch deep trench. Now, anyone who’s ever used a hoe in a garden knows that if you’re trying to work efficiently, it doesn’t take much for your back to start aching and your shoulders to burn with lactic acid buildup. Now, try envisioning that feeling as you hack and pull the earth down two 240’ rows. All of us, my veteran farmer bosses included, had to stop every ten to twenty feet to stretch out their backs and catch their breath. We were all sweating profusely. I was barefoot, the waterproof high boots I had been wearing to ward off the morning’s dew suddenly too hot to bear. In my glee at the beginning of the farming season, I had forgotten how icky and uncomfortable farming can get at times. “This kind of work is the reason why the Russian peasants rebelled against the Bolsheviks under their agrarian reform policies,” I thought to myself, one of my courses during my final semester of college flooding back to me. Especially when those darned implements, the very tools that were designed to make farmers’ lives easier, fail to do just that.
At the end of the day, after we had scrambled to get the last of the potatoes in before quitting time, I stood and looked at the fields, noticing how our slightly-crooked rows dipped towards the back of the field towards the muddy brook in the woods. Those rows, I thought, were deceptively long. They had fooled me into thinking they were shorter and that the work would be easier to complete. Indeed, some farm tasks always feel longer than you think they will, the beds seeming to stretch on endlessly. But there’s an overwhelming pride in knowing that you can do it, in knowing that you’ve done it, as you stand there after a day’s work, sweaty and exhausted as anything, but with a tangible task well done as proof of your time and effort.
by Sara Franklin
May 1, 2008
This past Friday, we at NoHo Town Farm were handed a reminder that farm life is unpredictable and can be awfully disappointing. Last Friday, my co-apprentices and I arrived at work to the news that the second of my bosses’ goats set to kid this spring had gone into labor. Things were progressing slowly, but Ben, my boss, promised that he would call us over to the goat shed when the action began to develop.
After a couple hours of site work, Ben called. Flannery, the goat in labor, seemed to be getting closer. My two coworkers and I rushed over to Ben and Oona’s house, a quick half-mile from the farm, and raced down their sloping backyard to the goat pasture. Flannery was on the ground breathing heavily, clearly uncomfortable, Ben sitting patiently beside her. False alarm. After nearly two hours of waiting and watching, Flannery’s state still seemed stagnant. So the other apprentices and I were sent back to the farm to get some work done, again with the promise that we’d get a call when the time came.
Less than half an hour into our afternoon’s tasks, Ben called again. I quickly switched off the hose I was using to water the newly transplanted blueberries and hearty kiwis and we all zipped over to the house again. By the time we arrived, it was too late- Flannery had finished kidding, and the news wasn’t good. Her first, a male, had been stillborn, and her second, also a boy, didn’t seem to be doing well. We sat and waited anxiously as Flannery tried to nibble at her kid’s umbilical cord, and watched in wonder as he gingerly tried his luck at the teat. None of us wanted to think about or acknowledge the stillborn kid. After a short stint, Ben sent us back to the farm once again, eager to get the onion and leek starts transplanted into the beds before the weekend’s predicted rain arrived.
As I buried the delicate green stalks of the alliums into the freshly tilled soil that afternoon, I found myself thinking about the rhythms, or lack thereof, of farming. So much of the farm life is built upon repetition, what you know, what you can predict, and good planning. But then there are the curveballs. Whether it’s a drought, a blight, or a joyous event turned sour like the stillborn kid, farmers face great unpredictability. In trying to harness the elements of the natural world to work to our advantage, to raise domestic animals and grow food, we as farmers must learn to compromise, to let go of control. The poet May Sarton wisely noted, “I am, I think, more of a poet… if to be a poet means allowing life to flow through one rather than forcing it to a mold the will has shaped; if it means learning to let the day shape the work, not the work, the day, and so live towards essence as naturally as a bird or a flower”. A good farmer works with the unexpected detours from the well thought out plan, constantly being reminded that we cannot exercise our power over nature, we can only coax her to be gentle and kind with us as we attempt to reap her gifts in order to sustain ourselves.
Early Sunday morning I found an email from Ben to the apprentices in our inbox. The new kid was doing well, nursing like a champ, and it seemed like he was going to make it after all. They had named him “Maybe” in light of his feeble first forty eight hours of life. Despite the uncertainty, the sadness, and the frustration at thwarted plans, “Maybe” things on the farm will work out just as they should, even if it’s not the way we thought they would.
 April 18, 2008
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, the growing season suddenly arrived. Perhaps the blending of the days and weeks into one another had something to do with the tumult in my life since the New Year began. Since January 1, I spent two weeks exploring a new part of the country with my best friend, said goodbye to my longtime boyfriend who was going to farm in Italy for three months, quit my last semester of college to move home to take care of my ailing mother, held her hand as she died, reunited with my boyfriend, and then moved up here with him to Amherst, Massachusetts, our home for the 2008 growing season.
Finally catching my breath after the move, I knew I needed to get back into the earth, to turn soil and plant seeds. For what better way to ground oneself and celebrate the passing of loved one than to midwife new lives into the world? So I began to dig up the patch of overgrown garden in our new backyard, planted peas, and began a new farming season working at the brand spanking new NoHo Town Farm, owned and run by Ben James and Oona Coy, in Northampton, MA.
Now this is only my second season farming, and my first full season that I’ll see through from seeding to storing squash and potatoes in the root cellar for the winter. Although I grew up in the suburbs, buying all my food at a supermarket, my mother had rural roots and always planted a small garden in our backyard. The first peas of June, bursting July tomatoes, and crisp August cucumbers were always heaped, unadorned, at table in place of more complex side dishes. Despite the joy of eating the beautiful produce my mother so proudly grew, I resisted working in the garden as a child. My turn at farming didn’t come until I had lived for three years in urban Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I had developed a knack for pantry cooking and an appreciation of fine food, but felt little connection with the world of agriculture beyond my love of open space and quiet. What drew me back to farming was academic study of community health and nutrition and a passion for promoting health and preventing disease. I began an internship farming at a community farm in Waltham, MA immediately after a three-month stint in South Africa where I was deeply moved by the irony of such poverty in a land blessed with such rich arable land. And so, upon returning to the States, I dove into action, believing that the best way to promote justice and better health for the community, individuals, and the land was to participate in sustainable farming. My idealism, like that of many first time farmers, was soon shattered when I began to live the day-to-day life of a farmer, dropping to sleep before dark many nights and waking with the first glimpse of the sun. What I learned as a novice last summer was that as a farmer, you will work harder, sweat more, and make more mistakes than you ever thought possible; that no amount of schooling you have received will teach you to be a good grower; and that the earth is remarkably forgiving and fruitful, despite our human blunders.
Planting brassicas (the family of plants containing cabbage, kale, pac choi and the like) last week, with dirt working its way under my cropped fingernails, I felt a deep sense of peace come over me. The April morning was edged with frost and all the crew members wore hats and heavy sweaters, but the perfect blue sky promised a warm afternoon and ample sunshine. The familiar soreness and ache in my shoulders and lower back, reminiscent of the harvest days of August, had reappeared, reminding me how unfamiliar my body has become with the work over the winter. But in that dull pain and the lingering strangeness of being in a new place was the comfort of knowing that I’m back with my hands in the dirt, doing real work, building community around food, and growing the plants I love to cook with and nibble right out of the ground in the heat of summer days.
So stay with me as I reconnect, a new farmer in a new place in a new chapter of her life.
Sara
Sara can be reached at sara.b.franklin@gmail.com
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