go to seed not long after the season begins. Today we are giving beautiful spinach, walking onions, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and gourds we dried over the winter. Most years, radishes, lettuce, and Asian greens join the list; with this year’s cool spring, they’re on their way. In just two weeks, we’ll give twice that variety of vegetables, and by August, three times that again, but for this first pick, the real share is a welcome to another season at Stonebridge.
By ten o’clock, we shed our sweatshirts and are soon down to our shirtsleeves. With the pick biked in for our barn boss, Eva, to count, weigh, and arrange in the barn, we weed the strawberries and the rose garden until it is time to meet the new members at eleven o’clock by the barn. John gives his annual safety talk: be careful near the ditches, stay with your children at all times, don’t play on the equipment, watch for “leaves of three, let them be” poison ivy. Following his talk, I lead the tour to familiarize new members with the fields and the layout of the farm. As we walk out toward the largest field, I don’t intend to mention the new owls because I’m concerned that a large group of people might frighten the mother into abandoning the babies, but someone spots some barterers pointing at the nest in the tree, so the owlets become the stars of the tour after all. I’m secretly glad everyone sees them—how often does anyone get to see twin great-horned owlets that close?—and the owls don’t seem too disturbed at the uninvited attention.
Soon the farm is full of happy people welcoming the first vegetables of the season and revisiting their favorite Stonebridge spots. While I’m chatting with new members, I hear squawking; some young boys have let the chickens out of the coop and I have to shoo them (the chickens, not the boys) back inside. Slippy, our irascible black goat, butts the fence next to a couple children who have been inviting her to play. “That means NO!” exclaims the little girl to her littler brother, interpreting the body language of goats with a giggle. A returning member has brought a friend and their children for a picnic and they share the delicious “friendship bread” she baked. In the barn, Eva helps new members figure out the scales. If the weights aren’t set correctly, one pound of spinach might end up filling a whole bag. “That must be too much,” announces one subscriber. He’s right: the pound weight was set on “one” to start rather than “zero.” Weighing vegetables is a great way to teach kids mathematical skills and some common sense as well. What does a pound of spinach look like? Feel like? Taste like?
Opening day marks a new beginning on the farm, one that enlivens the land with the busyness of many more humans. Once the pick-up season begins on that second Saturday in May, time changes too. Each week is now marked by Saturdays, when the farm bustles with people walking and talking, slowing down their city ways, and noticing the natural world around them. Asking people to walk from the parking area below rather than drive up to the barn doesn’t just increase safety on the driveway and the bridge, but creates a transitional space as they stroll up the gravel drive and cross the irrigation ditch to the barn. That walk is an invitation to enter the natural pace of the farm.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. From the water streaming in the ditches to the grass growing in the meadow and the birds chirping in the trees, nothing on the farm says, “Hurry.” We have to slow down to match nature’s pace. To live and work on the farm, we must come to a different understanding of “accomplishment,” one not measured by our résumés or awards or bank accounts, but by how well we care for this land and each other, our small part in sustaining the greater world around us.
After we’ve picked and counted and greeted and welcomed and toured and talked, John and I walk back to the house for lunch and naps. Opening day has been perfect this year, the kind of spring day when working outside feels like play. We are grateful for the community of Stonebridge members that returns us to the fields each day. The start of another farm season has begun with its familiar rhythm: We work, we wait, and the earth gives again.
Like a sturdy and steadfast apple tree, my fifth-grade teacher inspired our first Earth Day lesson of caring for the natural world.
The First Earth Day—And Still Counting
On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, I was a student in Mr. Osborn’s fifth grade class at Sherwood Elementary. Between the Vietnam War and the dawning awareness of environmental degradation in the late 1960s, sometimes the world seemed a pretty dark place. But in Mr. Osborn’s fifth grade class, we students felt the hopefulness of a world blooming with new and exciting possibilities. Under Mr. Osborn’s gifted teaching, we engaged with important social events of the times in our own youthful way.
The first Earth Day was organized by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson to bring national attention to the growing problems of environmental degradation through grassroots actions focused on issues in local communities. On Earth Day, people were asked to demonstrate care for an earth whose gifts of clean air, water, and soil could no longer be taken for granted. Earth Day would not only create awareness of the steadily declining health of the environment, but bring hope of a better future for the planet.
Our fifth grade class decided to join the first Earth Day celebration by turning the hard dirt outside our classroom into a beautiful garden of grass and flowers. All it would take, we thought, were some shovels and a few seeds. On April 22, we showed up with tools—the girls wearing pants, which wasn’t normally allowed—and worked like crazy all day to get that small square of soil ready for the plants we imagined would grow there. Mr. Osborn even let me run the block home for my wagon to haul away rocks and trash. With rakes and hoes in our young hands, we scratched tiny furrows in the soil to plant our hopeful seeds. A little water, a little weeding, and we’d have our first Earth Day garden. At the end of the day, we were dirty and tired, but proud to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
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