Dig It

Spinach, coming up in the salad table.

With the close of last summer’s CSA came the decision to spend some time out of the farm fields and inside an office. This week, I reach the five-month mark as a Chesapeake Conservation Corps Volunteer, a yearlong position that has allowed me to promote, through a non-profit, both environmental stewardship and sustainable agriculture.

The opening of this door led to a demotion, of sorts: no longer a small-scale farmer or even a simple farmhand, I am now what some call an “avid gardener,” with a 625-square-foot community garden plot to prove it. But I look at this growing season as an adventure nonetheless, as I learn how to water a bed of just-planted seeds from three massive, but still empty, metal cisterns, or how to retain some semblance of sanity while digging up the little pieces of black plastic that were left behind by my plot’s previous tenants (who, I’ve heard, “just let the season get away from them”).

Much of this season’s preparations are similar to last’s: drawing a garden map, ordering seeds, lamenting the rain that keeps me inside. Only this time, I’m met with a smaller space and a bigger need to be creative. Instead of starting seeds in the heated (and oft-watered) greenhouse of those who so kindly lent me their land, I’ve started them in a structure I’ve cobbled together with two metal garden hoops and a large sheet of greenhouse plastic recovered from my parents’ shed. And instead of growing salad greens and cooking greens and head lettuce in ever-so-spacious beds, I’m growing them in a salad table that is nothing more than a re-purposed wood-framed chicken coop door. The plants, of course, don’t seem to mind the difference.