Summer

My hands forage for edible leaves in the thick forest of kale. I salvage what I can, leaving the rest for aphids and rabbits and worms (the worms always get something in the end, don’t they, whether it is the tender flesh of bunny or ribs of a browning leaf?). I encircle the stalk with my calloused palms and pull. The sound of separation, of cleaving, the arms of the plant reaching deeper and finally giving as I pull and pull and pull those exploratory veins from the earth. Roots ripped from soil lay in a tangle of delicate threads, moist bits of sand and clay and billions of bacteria falling onto flowers, onto plucked stems, onto the same ground below. Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. 

It is time to play Shiva.

As the sun seemingly stalls overhead, summer begins with destruction and life. It is time for the new. I clear beds of green and yellow and brown. I feed the compost with what we didn’t consume. I heap the beds with manure and work it into the hungry ground. Smoothing the bed, I untuck seeds from colorful packets promising bounty and from my fingers nestle each one into its new home. 

This is the business of life. 

This is the virtue of death. 

The work never ends, thankfully. My mind on nurturing the radicle, the shoots and leaves, the fruits of the vegetables' sun-fueled labor, the harvest, the flower and the disintegration. I am here to witness it all as equinox becomes solstice and we begin to fall again towards that equal time of light and dark. I walk through a sea of pale daisies that were once shorn fields of bright yellow dandelions and I wonder what will come next. There is wonder and surprise as I ease raspberries from prickly branches that were once covered with blooms. I marvel as the carrots push at their dirty blankets of protection and show proud shoulders beneath a wispy sky of deep green. I consider the immensity of the universe, what we think we know, what we think we truly are, as each seed becomes something entirely different from what it once was and has always been. 

I tear away the old rotting parts, I plant the new. I farm, I write, I cook, I sit on the porch and let the sun coax out the freckles on my nose. 

This is summer. This is a seed for what is to come. This is the nourishment of now.

Eat the Truth

It makes me anxious. Terrified really. I don’t want this to happen. I want to shield them from this reality. I want to pluck out the evidence at its source. They may be the last to know even when WE ALL KNOW. We are OK with it. Sort of. We just skirt around the issue as we chew and smile.

But They may not be OK with it. They may not want to skirt anything of the sort.

They will be excited for the day the box arrives. They will come to town with high expectations, a rumbling belly, a head full of dreams of creation and nourishment.

Fwap. Fwap. Plastic arms open into theirs. They gently expose the contents of the mysterious black box they've been waiting for all week. They pull at curly leafed lettuce and poke at the smoothly wrapped gift of cabbage. They lift up the kale to find adorable peppers and a rainbow of chard. They pop a leaf of basil into their mouth unable to resist the memories of warm summer pesto evenings. They pick out their striped tomatoes and peach-colored watermelons. They pile everything into a bag or box and say hello to all of us harvesters sitting at a table eating lunch as they make their way back to their car.

My anxiety grows. I want to warn them. But I also know that this is an important life lesson. That they need to know the facts and I can’t be the one to halt that process. I can’t be the one to pretend like it didn’t happen.

They will get home and plan out dinner. Corn will be on the menu. They will wash the lettuce for salad, chop up the eggplant to fry in olive oil, slice the tomatoes for garnish. Then comes the moment when they peel back the husks and silk and find it gorging on their dinner. Their dinner! Excrement and sloppy chewing filling the space around emptied kernels with a wriggling monstrous worm sloshing away in his own doings.

They will drop the corn and scream. They will throw the corn out the window straight into the compost pile. They will root through the rest of their box looking for wrigglers. They will never buy organic corn (or anything else from the ground) again. EVER. The farm will go out of business.

Pause. Rewind.

These are sensible, CSA, farm loving folks. They know that worms are a sign that the corn is not sprayed with pesticides, not GMO, not dripping with toxins. They know that sharing with the bugs happens, that this sweet corn is delicious to a variety of creatures.

And perhaps they want to know the truth:

Corn comes from outside!

Corn grows up from the dirt!

Corn and all the other organic vegetables inevitably have creatures crawling on them at one point or another whether you see them or not. And sometimes that one point is when they go into the boxes and go home with you.

So why the anxiety? Because I have seen those who won’t touch dirty tomatoes and shrink away from twisted carrots. I have washed my fair share of produce going into CSA boxes to ease folks into the ‘veggies come from dirt’ discovery. But I know the time is now for the link to be solidified between soil and nourishment, that there are so many who are ready for the mental hurdle that bugs on food can present. And we are helping them on that journey.

I start to have faith that these folks will still eat that corn. That they will embrace the worm (or feed him to the chickens) and devour the sweet juicy niblets. That they will appreciate the reminder that all life needs nourishment and who (or what) can resist fresh September corn on the cob? 

I look down onto my plate full of salad from the farm. 

There is a tiny green worm inching towards the edge. 

I smile and let him crawl, the worry dripping away like butter off a cob. I am no longer anxious about the effect the worm in the corn will have. I realize I am actually part of the effect, a source of positive change in this society, thanks to this farmer’s honesty. 

I welcome another creature to our table and keep on eating.

Sitting with the Compost

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I scratch away at the straw and leaves and burrow my hand into the heap, just like the squirrels did last night. My fingers slide into damp heat, my wrist itchy with dirt and coffee grounds. I hold my arm steady as long as I can as warm seeps into hot climbs into burning scarred skin. 

But now I know it is cooking. 

This decay is squirming with life, microbes devouring their fill of what we could not. Devour. 

What we let go we pour onto a heap, cover it with earth, feed the fire with water, and nourish it until it happily crumbles into compost for the next thing. 

The next seed. 

The next bloom and fruit.

But it is too hot for me right now. My fingers burn with reactions. I need to sit with this pile, be patient with its process, wait for the natural decline in temperature and activity. I will sit under the pepper tree and write. I will cook vegetables I picked from the fields yesterday in cast iron pans and pickle the rest in cloudy mason jars. I will sing and dance and cry and giggle giggle giggle until we cry again in tents, at picnic tables, held in branches. I will talk with the foxes and the deer as they cross the hollow dip in the mountain where the oaks shade and whisper. I will sit through the ecstasy of my hair being brushed, oiled, braided. I will leave love notes in scavenged mailboxes hanging from trees and squish clay from the rock pile between my fingers and onto my face and feel it crack in the heat.

I will wait for the work to do itself before sinking my pitchfork deep into the crumbling result.

My hands bring earth up to my nose. I inhale the depth and life. I scoop and sift and sniff. I know that even this finished pile of nourishment is not broken all the way down. So I sift out the readiest of the sticks and eggshell strewn bunch and toss the rest back in to cook some more. 

The process unfolds. The breakdown continues to nourish. The decay is the point; without it there is no life, no sweet smelling earth, no stone fruit dripping juices onto chin, chest, toes from a smiling mouth.

I have piled, watered, nourished. Now we decay. Now we delight.

Back on the farm

Dirty fingernails, open heart.

I milked a goat for the first time today. Or I think it was the first time. She munched on molasses covered oats as I took a hand to her udder. Pinch. Rhythmic squeeze. The sound of milk hitting the inside of the metal pail. I was slightly disgusted at first. I mean, what else comes out of a body? Pee, shit, semen, snot, tears, saliva, sometimes blood. None of those are edible (those of you snickering- you know what I mean). So to see something come out of a warm body with the intention to put it in my chicory latte later was slightly disturbing.

And that is why I am here on a farm- to encounter those realities that we have pushed aside for convenience, blissful in our unknowing. We ignore the fact that steak comes from an eviscerated cow or those mushrooms were grown on manure or that the kale leaf has holes because bugs were munching away on the organic goodness. Some of us have a higher tolerance than others. But finding out where and how your food is grown, milked, processed is important. The disconnect does not serve you, the farmer, the earth.

After coming to terms with the reality of milk (and slurping down the rest of my latte- yes, the farm has a quirky tiki-like coffee bar), I harvested broccoli florets and leaves for the weekly CSA. The tiny green buds were sweet and crunchy when I popped a stem into my mouth. I could be happy all day grazing through the fields, a leaf of arugula here, a bitter dose of dandelion there. I brush the occasional bug away (I have a higher tolerance on that front) and chew the sunshine with giddiness.

I dug up baby Mizuna in a hoophouse to give the other adolescent greens some room to stretch towards the spiders in the cloth above, nestle roots unencumbered into the loose soil below. I carried trays of the travelers and transplanted the spindly spiky shoots into an open field. Dig a hole, sprinkle with fish meal and beet pulp, worm castings and ground shells. Carefully break apart seedlings and place them in smaller clumps into their new homes. Tuck soil around them, douse them with a welcomed bath of water. Wish them luck through the cold nights filled with rabbits and gophers. Repeat.

My fingernails are dirty, my belly full of milk and cheese and greens, my nose is pink with sun.  

My eyes are bright with the nourishment of the earth and community.