by Kim Kneeland
Hello everyone! It’s Summer again (okay, not technically, but soon) and you know what that means…Middlebury College Organic Farm Interns are getting dirty in the garden. We’re gearing up for a season of planting, weeding, shoveling, picking, eating, cooking, and learning.
This blog is a way to share our experiences with all of you as well as a way for us to remember such a rich and fulfilling summer. Maybe next year’s interns will be able to find helpful, meaningful, or completely random tidbits in our posts and build off of them.
The really amazing thing about gardens is that they span time. You build up your garden looking both to the past and to the future for guidance. It takes long-term planning, commitment, and trial-and-error to build up the right kinds of soils and crop rotations that will work best. They are true “connectors,” connecting people, plants, insects, animals, weather, life, and death. Take a moment to muse over this point the next time you’re in the garden wiggling your toes in the dirt while munching on a [insert veggie of your choice here] –we certainly have been, and it has been so nice to slow down and really appreciate what we are doing. And, you know, the special thing about our garden/farm (whichever you prefer) in Middlebury is that it’s inherited. Everyone who has ever worked in it is connected to everyone who will ever work in it. It’s a wondrous thing to be given something into which so many people before you have put countless hours of love and it is a great feeling to know you building on that foundation for others. I think this blog will serve as another element of the garden’s ability to connect us all.
