Monday, 4/11
Finally, our first day in the herb garden as a class! The weather held out for us this morning so after spending some time weeding with Sarah in our community garden plot, I took a group over to the herb garden to start some weeding there as well.
We focused on the lower left quadrant of the garden, which contains lovage, elecampane, and an excess of lemon balm, which Laura and I will be using for our essential oil distilling workshop in Week 7. After an hour of work, we had filled half of a wheelbarrow with weeds.
I also personally took on the task of weeding the tansy patch today. Tansy spreads like crazy once it is introduced to an area, so containing the amount in the herb garden will be an important task throughout the spring and summer seasons.
Unweeded 
Weeded!
In the afternoon, Sarah hosted a work party for the community garden that I was happy to attend. The weather turned sour pretty quickly, but our group of six attacked the community garden greenhouse even in the cold and rain, removing pile after pile of trash, sorting seeding trays and pots, coiling old hoses and drip tape, and so much more. Wasp nests were knocked down, the home of a mouse was invaded, weeds were torn out and woodchips were laid down. It was a lot of work but we got it done, ending the afternoon by lugging the file cabinet of seeds from the toolshed all the way into the greenhouse. The space looks so much nicer now and will hopefully get some more use. It was a satisfying day of work for both the community and herb gardens!
Looking ahead, I am excited for what is to come. I met with students in the Practice of Organic Farming program who are interested in getting involved in the herb garden, which has solved my worries about the garden going untended over this summer. I am also beginning drafts of an updated garden map modeled off of the map from 2017 so that we finally know what herbs are where and what possibilities the garden might hold for new plant additions in the future. Finally, I am hopeful to begin including weekly plant articles for my peers in the Taste program to accompany the weekly class preparation plans. These articles will provide some basic growth and medicinal overviews for plants of my choosing, and will hopefully spark any inspiration that my peers may have in working with these plants. Huge shoutout to my peers in the herb garden today, I am deeply grateful for the extra support and enthusiasm to work within this special space.
Wednesday, 4/13
The Equity Symposium – Tending Seeds Tends People
As part of the Equity Symposium on campus, Sarah Dyer, with support from the rest of the Food and Ag interns, students from the Taste program, and Food and Ag faculty, hosted a wonderful workshop titled “Tending Seeds Tends People.” In this workshop, inspirational examples of student success within the Food and Ag pathway were shared, before a community seeding was hosted with support from Beth, the Organic Farm manager. I shared the story of how I wound up in this Herb Garden internship position before accompanying the group to the farm to help with the seed planting process. I worked with spinach and nasturtium seeds and learned that to encourage growth from a nasturtium seed, it is helpful to give the seed a small scratch. It was a bit time-consuming but I got it all done!
“KNOW WE LOVED YOU IN ADVANCE.”
Thinking about this quote from the end of Walidah Imarisha’s Equity Symposium presentation reminds me of the work I am doing in the herb garden and the work we are doing as a class within the community garden. We are planting the seeds and tending them for future students, students we may never even meet, so that they can experience the same joy and passion that all of us are experiencing right now. This is a beautiful connection, one that showed up intensely within our afternoon seeding workshop at the Organic Farm. We came together as a community of friends and strangers to plant seeds for even more strangers. We are sharing the gift of fresh plants with our greater community, our peers, and ourselves. How wonderful is that?
After the seeding workshop, I stuck around to support Sarah in cleaning things up and to participate in the farm’s volunteer hours. We worked on turning the soil in one of the high tunnels, trapping pesky weeds beneath the overturned heaps. As a big surprise halfway through working, giant flakes of snow began to drop from the sky. Snow in April?! Absolutely unheard of. Luckily, the high tunnel kept us dry while we worked and everyone got to experience a bit of snowy magic on the farm.
