Foundation Farm: Leaving Rattles Garden

In an unexpected turn I have changed all my summer plans! I am now in northern Arkansas living the life of an intern on an organic farm so tremenously different from Rattles Garden it's astonishing. I've been soaking in the joy of this new scenery since Sunday (now it's Wednesday). Here's how it happened.

Last week I was working at Rattles Garden, on Monday I harvested 4 gallons of blueberries alone, Wednesday found me harvesting more blueberries with my ipod as company. The newness and excitement of my tasks and surroundings was fading. The isolation of the farm was draining me in a way that I did not expect.

I have to leave an honest and complete account here, so I can't leave out any bits of the conflict. Tara and I finally had to open up and tell eachother how we were feeling about my internship. Unfortuantely to bring about this level of honesty took some friction. On Tuesday I fell asleep in the afternoon without setting an alarm, I woke up at 7pm, too late to finish up the day's hours. Tara was really quiet about it, she commented that I must have needed the rest and we carried on normally. The next morning she mentioned that we would be mowing that afternoon at 5pm, the day went foreward normally, us speaking very little and working on separate things out in the field. I laid down early that afternoon and would have gone on thinking that Tara was not irked by my sleep accident... had it not happened again. Tara went outside and started on the push mowing in the heat, 8 months pregnant. When I woke up to Robert's angry shouting I felt horrible! Really my intention at the farm was to help Tara out through the end of her pregnancy because I really do like her, so I felt inadequate to my own standards as well as to Tara. I asked to have a performance review with Tara the next day and she agreed.

That evening Robert (Tara's husband) explained that Tara comes from a special breed of people called midwesterners who stoically work non-stop. They also have discomfort with expressing appreciation and annoyance, as well as other feelings, Robert explained. A final catch about Tara and her family is that you just about have to be a mindreader to understand how they're feeling or what they want from you. This talk with Robert really made me feel better, it showed me that I wasn't the only one who felt a little out of the loop sometimes and made me feel good about our plans to get clear on how we felt my job was going the next day.

In our talk it came out that both Tara and I have mostly warm feelings towards echother, which I expected. An important thing I learned is that she feels she has a tendency to micro-manage so she had been careful to manage me from great distance. That is not something I appreciated (or maybe I did and just didn't know it). But Tara really had shown me no sign that she might be a micro manager.

In fact, the only thing that worried me going into our meeting is that she had barely corrected anything that I did around the house or farm. I thought she may have accumulated a list of complaints that she wasn'y comfortable saying in the moment. Anyway, finally we felt better, liked eachother once again and I needed to get something off my chest. I was almost fishing for an apology as much as trying to understand why she handled the napping incedent the way she did, "While acknowledging my failure to make sure to be up at 5, your decision to go outside and mow without waking me up guaranteed that you would be mad and I would feel inadequate." She totally agreed! She meant to do that! That confused me, I just don't get that and probably never will.

At the end of the review I decided to call it quits at the end of the month. This was biult in to our agreement from the start; If either she or I wanted to end it, we would and there would be no hard feelings. It was a good arrangement for a first time host and intern.

I made this choice without mixed feelings. First, I was guaranteed a summer of solitude and berry picking. This is not something that fits with my plans of learning the attitudes, motivations and strategies of small-scale and heritage food producers. Also berry picking alone sucks. No thank you. I wasn't in it for the $500 a month, so the long hours spent along wasn't keeping me either. On top of that, Robert and Tara just didn't want to have a conversation with me, generally speaking. Tara's stoic workaholism made me uncomfortable, and she wouldn't try the things I cooked. At the end of the day squash stir-fry plus ground beef wraps were consumed speechlessly before the television in the hour or so preceeding bedtime. Rattle's Garden seemed driven by the value of work for work's sake, not for food's sake.

All this negativity! My time on this library computer is drawing to a close so let me impress that my experience with Tara and her beatiful garden was invaluable! I indeed would have done it for free, I was inspired by Tara's commitment to chemical-free gardening she was wary of neem oil and pyrethrum. I very strongly came to understand her force of will to tolerate losses to pests and disease "I just keep planting new starts all season" One thing Tara is: unshakeable. She is the kind of woman whose determination to her business inspires the common person to commit to their own projects and awes competing farmers (southern farmers who like to relax sometimes watching a sunset on the porch with a beer). At the farmers market Tara raises the bar for other farmers (she actually trained with the US Olympic pole vaulting team, neat fact) Her layout is orderly and beatiful, she refuses to sell any marred bean, any overlarge squash. Quart containers neatly display her unblemished produce flanked by the choicest sunflowers and zenias. Her philosophy of farming plants her in firm opposition to those old-school farmers who generously spray, dust, and spread chemical and pedal their produce at a dollar below the rest of the market.

Now, thru a series of lucky accidents I'm with Madeleine, a housemate from the eco-house last year, at a farm near Eureka Springs Arkansas where she is WWOOfing this summer. This farm "Foundation Farm" run by the frenchman Patrice Gros is so fundamentally different from Rattles garden, it's astounding. More to come in the next post to be titled "Foundation Farm: Gettting There"

Rattles Garden: An Introduction

When I woke up this morning I looked out my window and for the first time since I've been working at Rattle's Garden noticed cassiopeia in the east, low near the horizon. It's been there most every day when I wake up but I only noticed it today, it was a special treat. It reminds me of the expectations I was holding for this summertime farming internship. I imagined, among other things, that I would watch the stars. I saw myself spending my free time bearing witness to the stuff that happens naturally in this tiny postage stamp of nature that Tara and I are working to coax vegetables out of. These last three weeks have very very slowly unfolded a mixed bag of lessons about my tasks, the farm, and my whole project's design.

I've got a late start on telling the story of my time on this farm! There is plenty to tell about these last three weeks or so, but the longer I go without posting to this blog, the more daunting a task it seems. I want to do justice to the story and give enough background as well. but at this point, I'm just going to post whatever I've pieced together from my notes before it's time to go to bed.

...on second thought, I'm just going to chop off the worthless bits of my notes, not piece them together at all, and call it a night. So here it is: my thoughts so far...

Friday 6/10:

I've been at the farm for ten great days now and I expect more to come. I'm thriving on the rhythm and pace of the day, the tiring work, and my boss's uplifting attitude. I get up without an alarm at about 5:30 when it's starting to get light. Tara, my boss, also gets up around then to let the dogs out. I hear her prodding them with words "go on, Sadie you too, go on. Judy, you're a mess. Come on... Come on Chasie". Robert her husband is one of those guys who will hit snooze for about an hour so he comes out later.

I always rinse off in a cold shower to wake up and then sit quietly outside to get ready for the day. Then I eat breakfast, usually rice and beans. I'm on my own for lunch and breakfast so I fixed a mess of rice and beans when I got here to keep in the fridge for easy meals. But today I had some yellow squash and onion with onions and garlic all from the garden because I get all the garden produce I can eat. After breakfast I pick a ridiculous amount of summer squash, every day we fill up two five gallon buckets with yellow crook-neck, zucchini, and paddy-pan squash. Tara is having a tough time getting rid of it all. It's the only thing that's really coming in heavy right now, but the very first red tomatoes were ready today. We've been picking yellow "Sungold" cherry tomatoes gradually as they're beginning to turn. So my morning picking will begin to become a major task, but since I've started the major stuff has been mulching and trellising tomatoes.

These tasks have been enjoyable, and totally repetitive. I love working outdoors, there are so many bugs and the weather is always moving around. The sounds are nice and it feels good to get drenched in sweat. It's a clean sweat that leaves me feeling really clean after a quick rinse in the shower.

The other stuff that I've done includes picking green beans, tilling down between rows to weed, hunting horn-worms, planting starters with chicken manure fertilizer, planting okra and purple hull peas with the push seeder, drove the 4020 tractor, harvested basil and cilantro and stuff

What do I eat? Squash! It is outlandish how much squash there is in my life right now. I eat squash for every meal. I expected to be eating in season, happy to, but I'll be happy to supplement all this squash with the peas and tomatoes that are coming up next.

6/13: Try 2 at the Blog,

Well, now I've been here for just over two weeks, I just came back from my second weekend in conway bouncing between hospitable friends. The pace of life on the farm is accommodating for me, I'm already comfortable in the rhythm. Working hard in the mornings and evenings, lounging in the afternoons, going to bed tired and waking up early feeling refreshed.

I wonder to myself how it would be were I to move on from the farm now to go to the next one. Have I answered my questions? Why does Tara stay in the job of farming? She certainly doesn't have to. Do I really know what it's like to lead this life? Absolutely not, but did I get a good taste of it? I'll find out when I look back on this after I've been here longer. I understand how the constancy of growth this time of year demands constant nudging and guidance. Our work is never over, as the saying goes. And the tasks are a tempting draw somehow, I can't pull myself away from them. I settle into the rhythm of spreading hey mulch, and my mind does not dwell on the desired result. Just load the wheelbarrow, push it to the boundary between hay and soil and fit the flakes of hay together to cover the ground. Repeat.

Most of the jobs I do are repetative and easy like this, but I fancy myself a pretty fine tomato stringer. The tomatoes have to be hoisted by twine between posts so they don't rest on the ground. Each plant poses a new puzzle, where to put the string? There is a nice satisfaction in finding a perfectly downturned leaf at just the right height to hold the string, and a sense of a job well done at the sight of a row of plants whose sprawling growth has been neatly directed to push upwards.

Friday, 6/18: This blog post will happen

Today I am really in full swing of feeling better from a mild case of lethargy this past week. I was thrilled at the first week, then a bit romped by the second week.

Here's a curiosity or two.

1) Tara, being as concerned with food quality as she is on the farming side, is remarkably unconcerned with cooking. She woks squash and makes basic roasts (both the same every time) browns ground beef, and has made a couple squash casseroles. She doesn't really relish the act of cooking.

2) beyond that, she doesn't seem to relish many acts. That sounds bad and it should not because she is a very bright and smiling type of gal. The thing is that she works all the time! She doesn't really just shoot the shit with robert much, but some. She also does have great BS, but she doesn't seem to value relaxation and idleness at all. She is from Iowa and I after working a while with her I've deepened my appreciation for Prairie Home Companion, she's got that lutheran stoic work ethic that Garrison Keillor talks about. I just mean to say that Tara works a hell of a lot. That's all. Especially for a woman who is eight months pregnant. To me, that much work is reprehensible. Especially for a woman who is eight months pregnant.

But, more importantly, I have learned this fact, it takes A LOT of work hours to make this operation float, especially this time of year. A small-scale deal like this would really benefit from integrating animals through pasture management or manure collection, for example. I know Tara knows this because she wants a cow and she plans that this building will become the intern barn (this house could easily fit four interns comfortably and some WWOOFers could sleep with the dogs when necessary. But there is just so much work! It is obvious that one person can only go so far with an agricultural operation, and I think Tara has shown just how far that is. She also sees the next step of putting some interns in a barn

Sitting in my room, Lina just walked in, I ignore her and I hear her claws tapping the floor surreptitiously, when I twist around in my chair and our eyes meet, she puts her head down and to the side and kind of shimmies back out through the curtains that are my door. She knows she's not supposed to be in here.

Robert doesn't like making doors, so when he made the house, he made it so there are only doors to the outside. Cabinets are hung with curtains and my bathroom has a barn door on it. It kind of has the feel of an outhouse or a corn crib (not that I have much experience with those things) because the walls are just studs with unfinished plank nailed on one side so there are horizontal slivers of light in the wall. I like it.

Later that same day, "The notion of sabbath"

I wish I had decided to stick around for a sunday or two before thinking of this, but since I did not, I can at least guess what I may have done and felt the following week. I think that if I didn't have Conway, and instead were left to my own devices on the farm with no jobs for the day, I would probably work! I would be curious as to all the state of everything, go out to investigate and before I even knew it I would get on some task, expecting it to be quick, I'd discover its complexity, get deeper absorbed and end up no having taken full advantage of my day of rest.

What I'm saying is that this job has transformed my notion of what shabbat is for. I have always been the type of person to get into stuff and tenaciously work at it for a short time. But I am also fundamentally lazy. For a person like me on such a dynamic landscape as a farm, a time of enforced idleness is not only recuperative for the body and mind, but also an important tool for management of my efforts when it is time to apply them. After the sabbath, it is my obligation to be renewed in my capacity for physical work and refocused to direct this new force where it can serve best.

Sunday, June 20:

Eat well, sleep well, live well. I expected heavy physical work on this farm and Tara, my boss, did not disappoint.

Monday, June 21:

My appreciation for the miracle of enough water to drink has grown even more which is saying something. Here's an amusing anecdote from my past: in about sixth grade when I started caring about my appearance I hear that drinking lots of water was good for your complexion, so I started hauling a huge Grey Goose vodka bottle around full of water. That thing was so fun to drink out of and always with me. In freshman year of college I saw a beautiful empty Belvedere bottle in a friend's dorm, 1.5 liters, reminiscent of those couple years in middle school. He woldn't give it to me so I had to buy it off him for 14 dollars. I never used a cup for water in college after that. So, yeah, I'm a fan of staying hydrated.

But this farming thing takes it to the next level, I don't much care what I look like out here (which is good because apparently the juice that comes out of tomato hornworms stains. I put them on my shirts to collect them while hunting them off the plants. Then you feed them to the chickens. But sometimes they spit, or worse, fight with eachother and spill green juice. Well, now most all of my shirts have worm stains) but yeah, it's not for my skin that I'm drinking a lot of water, sweating so much it's like I have a fuel gauge and the readout is my attitude. When I get to feeling like crap and think things like "this shit blows, I'd rather be dry and in bed" it's my cue to slam half a liter.

Well, that was it, to wrap up I've got to say that this has been good for me. I've learned important lessons like: when you own a farm, get interns to do the picking. Among other things. It shouldn't be another three week+ gap before my next post. Goodnight.