Love To Grow On.

The following is my sister-in-law's response to Wendell Berry's poem that she shared with me. I thought it was wonderful, and therefore am posting it today, because I think you will agree.

Love To Grow On.

By: Beatrice Steiner

About a year ago, I spent a summer working as an educator at an organic farm outside of Boston. The place had grass-fed milk cows and beef cattle, a five-hundred member CSA, a 4-H program, and nearly one thousand acres of rolling green hills and hayfields. It’s pretty amazing.

One day, it was my job to teach kids how things grow, so I instructed my class of about ten three-year-olds to plant sunflowers in a garden by the barn. One girl, after planting her seed just right and watering them, sat down next to her tiny plot of land and started whispering to the soil. When I asked her what she was doing, she looked up at me and said matter-of-factly, “You told us that plants need love to grow, so I’m telling my seed I love it.” I’m really not making that up.

Later that summer, my sisters, then ages 14 and 16, came to visit. I was giving them a tour through the 20 acres of cultivated CSA land when I bent down at a row of plants and pulled a carrot from the ground. Gasps of astonishment followed. “Ohhh my gosh, Bea, that’s sooo cool.” Although they knew and understood that carrots were root vegetables that come from the ground, they had never seen anyone pull a carrot, or, for that matter, a beet, parsnip, or radish, from the dirt. It was like I unlocked a whole new mysterious world for them, where plants actually grew in the soil-- they didn’t just magically appear sparkling clean and bug-free in the grocery store. The girls were totally floored by the experience they had had at the farm. My youngest sister actually came back for a week to work on the farm (completely voluntarily, I would like to add), and was bummed every day at five when we had to stop working. My other sister, the following fall, did an in-depth research project on local food as a consequence of visiting the farm.

My sisters’ excitement wasn’t an exception. Often, I was in charge of a group of about eight kids, and we would go to harvest beets together. In about five minutes flat, I would have two buckets overflowing. Girls and boys alike would be so enthusiastic, with limbs flying every which way, yelling and shrieking, all searching for the biggest beet they could possibly find. Sometimes a little girl or boy would plead with me, “Can I please take this beet home with me? I want to show it to my mom.” They would become attached to what they were pulling out of the ground, dragging their wilty-looking vegetables from one activity to another, holding them like treasured stuffed animals.

What I loved most about teaching kids at the farm is that it made their hamburgers and french fries mean something. They got to witness and experience the fact that their food originated from the earth, not from a cardboard box or a neatly-stacked aisle at the store. They saw that it takes some hard work (and love) to make things grow.

As adults, buying directly from farmers or CSAs puts food back into context as well. When we know our farmers and see the fields where our food comes from, when we witness the full cycle of growth, food means something again.

Photo Credit: Susie Cushner, Country Living Magazine

(To view more beautiful pictures of Appleton Farms, click HERE:)

Following With Ease.

My brother is a farmer on the cusp of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In high school he was a supreme jock, semi-smooth ladies man and stellar athlete, doubtless following with ease the same path of my father who was also a socially gifted, athletic man. Yet, midway through his bullying high school jock years, he began meeting with a group of other “dudes” (aka: a small group, religiously centered) and instead of pushing me around kid-sister style, he began instead to drop tiny seeds in pots and watched as they pushed themselves up out of the dirt. Our basement was cornered with his plants. Seems that the more they sprouted and blossomed, the kinder he became. Although I cannot possibly chart this correlation into fact, I can say that he ditched his “bad-A” persona, faded away from the basketball courts, mellowed and worked in the dirt. He planted a tree in the front yard of my mother’s house – without bothering to ask permission, went off to college and beyond, farming here and there along the way. He was also a consistent “stalker” of his mentor a la literature: Wendell Berry. (I say that with kindness, only to suggest he traveled through a few states to hear a lecture or two. Or three.)

He was a very demanding brother. Often he would charge me to do, go, get, be, try, finish, etc. He pushed his interests with the confidence and superiority of an elder. He told me where I should go to school, he expressed his disappointment when I didn’t quite finish, he clogged my ears with his music and he criticized my outfits. Yet he never once told me I should start growing my own food. He never said I should try to eat organic and he wouldn’t guide me towards farmers markets. He kept his passion to himself, with the wisdom and confidence held in his mind that people would “get it” sooner or later. He was cultivating organic foods on remote farms before most of the fussy labels were even slapped on and placed in the aisle of a grocery store. He was ridiculed and labeled all sorts of mean hippy names by his peers who were heading off to business school. He refused to spray pesticides, even for Ralph Lauren. He went off to Argentina and returned drinking Matte out of a carved gourd before anyone knew what it was (I didn’t, anyway). He worked on farms in Oregon, Boston, Tennessee and scraped the dirt off his hands with dignity. I could be wrong, but in my eyes, he claimed a stake in the ethics of farming before it coincided with “trendy.” Of course, there are people who have been farming in America since before the country was named. What he does is by no means groundbreaking. I don’t mean to suggest that he is an innovator to the farming institution, only that he is an innovator to me, and I think he would be to you too if you knew him.

I don’t know why I want to glorify him. It could be because I am trying to follow his ways, or it could be because the person that ridiculed him as a “hippy-loving tree hugger” is now (in all likelihood) eating the organic food straight from where he farms. I’m just proud of him, that’s all. People who work hard deserve credit and people who are mocked because they do what they love, yet do it anyway deserve a little bit of glory, even if it is from their blogging kid sister.