The most exciting times for me were starting the seedlings in March and cooking and canning in the peak of the season. Garlic scape pesto, pickles, chow-chow, tomato sauces, dilly beans, zucchini brownies, parsnip cake, and butternut squash soup filled our kitchen, closets, and bellies. Our house was always full of people that we wrangled into helping sterilize mason jars or chop peppers. Both in the field and in the kitchen, I got to know the month by the produce and the hour by the task. Working with fresh food gives you context for yourself and connection to the community around you. While growing vegetables is a reward in itself, helping to grow a community of people is something I have really valued and taken pride in. During the CSA season at the last farm I worked on, a lot of the members would come up to me and ask what I would do with kale or what to do with fennel. What we began to include in our weekly CSA emails were unusual recipes or dinner menu ideas that included the veggies from that weeks share. The next week the members would come back saying how much they loved it or how they slightly adjusted the recipe to make it their own. I learned so much about recipe making and learned a great deal about people’s tastes in food preparation. It was really amazing to see everyone come together. Before the season, we had all been strangers, but over the course of the season we had formed friendships over recipe swaps. I feel like too often today children and adults alike are disempowered and have trouble finding meaning in their lives. We are taught that the answer is outside ourselves, that there is a product we can consume, a place we can go to make us feel whole. My biggest hope in life is that I can help people to feel like they have the ability “to do” and “to make” themselves. It may sound silly, but I feel like planting a window garden of herbs from seed or roasting your own Redmeat radishes and Chioggia beets makes all the difference in the world. I don’t think that anyone says it better than Wendell Berry,
“Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude…”
