Slowing Down Enough To Hear The Birds
Birds chirp outside as I make myself tea to go with my breakfast, and I hear one bird song that stands out. I immediately drop what I’m doing, grab my phone and open Merlin, a bird-identifier app, go to the cracked window and try to get a good sound bite of the bird’s song, to find out what it is. This is a common occurrence for me now. I’m becoming a a bird nerd! Back in Evanston, I regularly hear sparrows, robins and cardinals. But oh boy, out here?? I regularly hear Summer Tanagers, Tufted Titmouses (Titmice??), Wood Thrushes, Carolina Wrens, Barred Owls in the evening, and a particularly noisy Eastern Wood Peewee that is intent on singing loudly at 5 am. I’ve also seen numerous hummingbirds zooming through the high tunnel on afternoons when I’m tending to the tomato plants inside.
Summer Tanager that’s been hanging around the house.
I’ve been here on the farm for about a month now, and aside from trying to catch a new bird every so often, I’ve been able to get myself oriented with this land, and I’m slowly finding a rhythm. The first couple weeks were a bit slow, since I came ahead of the official start date, and I didn’t have a lot of structure. I spent the time cleaning and sprucing up the intern apartment, exploring the trails, doing a handful of hours in the garden during the week, and adjusting to a secluded life in nature without my own transportation off the farm land. I like to call myself a super introvert, because I prefer to live alone, and can spend long amounts of time alone and be fine with it…but even I was very ready for the other intern to arrive so I could have some company! She arrived the last weekend in May, and on the 27th, we officially started the internship program!
The other intern is Cristina, and she’s a bubbly, super sweet college student, who’s focusing on learning about the livestock. She also enjoys cooking and baking, and we’ve had fun making dinners and getting creative with the produce we get each week (its a lot of greens and root vegetables!) Since one of her duties includes collecting eggs, she brings some home each week. James (the livestock manager) milks the goats every evening, so we also get our fill of goat milk whenever we need it! Heather is in charge of harvest and has been living on this farm for close to two decades, took Cristina and I on an adventure around the woods, pointing out different plants, leading us off-trail on deer paths, and just sharing her vast knowledge of this land.
My schedule has been mostly afternoon and evening work shifts, so I have most mornings free to do things like identify birds, work on my permaculture design class, and sit and write this blog post! Tuesday through Thursday, I have a few different shifts in the Market Garden, where we grow produce for local farmers markets. My evening shifts have consisted of transplanting flower or lettuce seedlings from the seed trays into the garden beds, and my afternoon shifts have been focused on learning about how to prune tomato plants and train them to grow up strings. That’s been my favorite part so far!
Looking into the high tunnel, where there are currently 5 rows of tomatoes, peppers, basil, sweet alyssum, onions, and some volunteer cilantro and nasturtiums on the outer edges.
I’ve been learning so much! Whether its from the books we were given to read, from my permaculture class, or from the farm staff here, I’ve been taking in so much info, and its all been very exciting! Stephan is the Land Management Specialist for this farm land, and is also filling the role of Lead Market Gardener, so I’ve been working the most with him. The man is so busy, and constantly running around (literally), but he’s got SO much knowledge and passion for growing, regenerative agriculture, and how to care for the earth well. He also loves growing tomatoes, and seems to be able to talk about them for hours, and I’m very happy he’s willing to bestow some of his knowledge on me this summer. Next week, he’s going to be gone on a family vacation, and I’m going to be attempting to fill in some of his jobs and keep things running in his absence… hopefully I can keep things alive!
I’m starting to refer to this farm (in my own mind) as the Little Farm That Could. This farm land has been through a lot of staffing transitions over the years, and is currently fairly understaffed… all the team leads are very busy and could use extra help (far more than what us interns can even provide). But everyone here- and it seems most everyone in the past as well- despite the challenges, loves this land, wants to care for it well, and seems devoted to helping it to thrive…and this current team also seem invested in helping each other thrive as well. I don’t know what this summer will hold, but I can already feel a draw to the life force of this little farming community, and the land we’re on. There’s SO much potential here, and there are dreams and plans in place to turn low producing fields into native species orchards, to use the sheep to help control invasive plants in the forest understory, help regenerate the oak tree population in these woods, to put in new hiking trails, and so much more. Its all so exciting, but will take time and human power to execute.
One of the biggest take-aways I’ve already gotten from these three weeks, however begrudgingly, is that I’ve got to have PATIENCE! (I’m not a fan of the concept.) I keep checking on the flowers I transplanted every few days and wondering why they’re not in full bloom yet. I keep reminding myself that it only JUST turned June, and we’re still technically in spring planting season. I keep being frustrated that the little apples on the trees outside this house have the audacity to not be ready right now, and that the concord grapes are hardly any bigger than they were when I arrived. The flower seeds I planted outside the house three days ago have also not sprouted yet. Like, rude??? *sigh* We talked to one of the members on the farm board the other day who planted a small permaculture orchard about three years ago. It’s so exciting because one day, it will be beautiful and epic, but dang, why do trees gotta take so long to grow??? I know that being forced to slow down and wait are good practices for me, but I’m still not a fan of it! Maybe (hopefully?) I’ll have a shift in mindset my the end of the summer, and be more comfortable with waiting. Time will only tell!
