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"