A Design for Your Next Meal
Everyone who eats food must experience working on a farm, I thought.
Did you ever take something for granted, and when you realized its importance, your world view changed?
How would you feel if your local grocery stores closed down, even for a month? Scary thought?
I had a backyard garden for years and loved to grow flowers and vegetables, but it was always for the joy of a few fresh beans or several weeks of picking the coveted heirloom tomatoes. I never took much time to consider how I might eat abundantly off my own little garden and preserve enough food to nourish me through the winter, until I had the pleasure of working on a community farm this summer. Wow, everyone who eats food must experience working on a farm, I thought.
My work exchange for a share of food was only 1-1/2 hours a week, but I learned a lot on those Thursday mornings. North Field Farm covers about 2 acres, not including the green house… enough to have long multiple rows of a large variety of vegetables, herbs and berries. During summer’s intense June heat, my work might entail harvesting greens at 7 am, keeping the pickings in the shade so they wouldn’t wilt before they got rinsed and refrigerated. On cold fall mornings my goal was to protect my fingers from frost bite as I snapped off crispy rain drenched kale leaves or lifted beets out of the cold earth.
If you find and remove a Tomato Hornworm you are a hero. They are hard to see and very destructive to the plants.
I love it. I love watching the plants grow… and then eating my share of what I pick. I know local and organic is best, but when you actually work on a small farm, and bring home the vegetables, it makes an indelible mark on the psyche. I’m not saying farming is easy. Hardly. But if it became a shared lifestyle, couldn’t it be rewarding, healthy and practical? Can’t we all learn how to work the local farm as we engage in a memory from our predecessors? I am hoping the title of CEO of gardening becomes the next hot career choice. What if our neighbors became as devoted to organic gardening, permaculture, orchards, hydroponic or vertical gardening as they are to mowing the lawn?
I bet the way they think about their food would change, like mine did.
[ This is part 3 of a 3-part blog on “design and community living” ]
