Of farms and farm tools

This past Saturday I drove West to the Berkshires, where I'll be living and working as a farm apprentice for the growing season.

After hours of packing, driving, unpacking, and settling in, I attended a potluck event for farmer apprentices as part of a regional training program. Weary after a long day, I found myself coming back to the same question in my mind: How on earth did I get here?

How does a love of container gardening, teaching kids about plants, and growing tomatoes on a back porch somehow lead up to looking at $10,000 farm equipment in the rain with thirty other aspiring farmers?

Looking back on the evolution of my interests in gardening and ecology, my self-five-years-ago never would have seen me here. But therein lies the beauty! To quote John Muir: "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." When I began studying Biology, I did so because of my love of animals. Animals, however, interact with plants, and they do so in some pretty awesome ways. Studying ecology led me to stream research with a focus on riparian plants, which led me to ethnobotany, which, coupled with my love for teaching, led me to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and onto other environmental education opportunities that somehow or another all included vegetable gardening. I tugged at a single thing in the natural world and it pulled me in at warp speed 'til I got to the bottom of the food chain! (Well, the human food chain at least.)

So here I am. As I packed up my things to bring out to the Berkshires, I found something I had purchased in Santa Fe last winter. It's a tiny piece of painted wood with a Native American proverb written at the bottom: "Creation is ongoing." The simplicity of this statement is beautiful, and for the past year it has been my mantra. I see creation in the way my life seems to keep taking exciting turns. I see it in the thousands of seedlings in the farm greenhouse. I see it in the endless opportunities to shift my mindset -- to think positively and be open to different perspectives. I see it in Spring.

I look forward to seeing where this apprenticeship takes me...