Hello everyone after a very long hiatus. More on the trials and tribulations that kept me from farm blogging all summer in the near future. In the meantime:
Last week a group of high school students from Lake Ridge Academy
We started the day by assembling in a circle in the parking lot and introducing ourselves. When the circle wound its way to me, I introduced myself as the Farm Manager and introduced the George Jones Farm as a place that has a fourfold mission:
1. To acquaint people, especially young people, with where food comes from. Just what does a potato plant or a kale plant look like?
2. To educate about responsible ways of producing food and teach sustainable agriculture skills and to even go beyond sustainability and aim for regenerative practices that actually improve the piece of earth in our care while feeding ourselves.
3. To teach through hand-on experience how to grow one’s own food. Imagine a world where everyone is involved in growing at least some portion of their food. What would our society’s relation as a whole to food (and to farms and farmers) be then?
4. To train a new generation of farmers who will grow food not just for themselves but for the communities around them.
These goals are progressive and form a spectrum. At the least, there is something powerful about encountering food at its source for individuals who have grown up in a “de-natured” culture of supermarkets and cellophane-wrapped vegetables. At the other end are those few people who find themselves called to engage in the grueling yet satisfying work of growing food for others, of transforming air, soil, and water into tomatoes, beans, and lettuce.
That day, we performed three tasks with this high school group. We prepared lamb’s quarter and purslane greens for use in a salad mix. We thinned radish seedlings, also for salad mix and to sell as sprouts. Lastly we weeded our squash one last time. Along the way the students took the scraps from all of these projects and their lunches and fed them to the chickens.
As they boarded their bus to head back to school I thanked them for all their help and asked them to consider that the world offers itself up with abundance naturally and that we have only to recognize what is offered. We took common weeds of the fields and transformed them into elements of a delicious mesclun, boosting the salad’s nutrition. We took the problem of too many radish seedlings crowding each other out and transformed them into a high-value product full of energy and spice. And lastly, we took “waste,” stems, and apple cores, and left-overs and transformed them into eggs.
Farming is a kind of alchemy. I know that this year of farming has transformed not only weeds and waste into food, but me as well. My hope is that for the few hours they were at the farm, perhaps some of the students have left transformed as well.
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