the body of the Lord:: first week!

have been a farmer for 4 days. drove the tractor (not so straight), seeded and potted up lots of things - eggplant, tomatoes, peppers & hot peppers, asian greens, marjoram, sage, and sorrell, and lots of spinach - and transplanted some things into the field, changed the oil on the tractor, spread fertilizer, covered newly-planted beds, watered stuff, carried bags of dirt...

These are varieties of eggplant we seeded on Thursday, and then some hot peppers on the right.

plants growing in trays, inside the hoophouse (like a greenhouse, but with plastic, not glass, and some other differences I don't really know yet).

4 tilled beds:

the hoophouse:

I have a nail on the right, just inside the door, for my lunch. the white cloth in bunches there goes over the plants at night if it's supposed to be below freezing: we are obsessed with weather reports, as they matter a lot more now.

why farm? why food?

Wendell Berry, from "The Pleasure of Eating":
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act.

Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers."

...How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one's consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one's own part in the food economy.

...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, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

the body of the Lord:

first week!

1 comment:

why farm? why food?

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