Anna Hewitt, Shelburne Farms

Anna Hewitt is an apprentice in the market garden at Shelburne Farms, a sustainable farm and nonprofit environmental education center in Vermont.

I can't say that my job is always unpredictable. It may not sound glamorous or exciting, but there is something to be said for routine. Weeks in the garden have patterns that repeat themselves again and again. It is within the patterns of the daily landscape that I notice the small details and changes. For the past three months, I have ridden the same two-mile route to work and watched the land go from brown and frozen to lush spring green to the muted hues of high summer. Once, early in the morning, I saw a hot air balloon near the mountains to the east. This misty morning I saw a great blue heron flapping its wide wings above me.

So, as part of the routine, Thursday is the day we seed. Every week we plant mesclun. I begin with 600 feet of lettuce mix. I tilled the land on Tuesday so today I rake it smooth and measure where the rows will go. All of our beds are 100 feet long, so I will seed the lettuce in six rows, each about six inches apart. I pour tiny, light, salt-and-pepper-colored seeds into the seeder. I hold the long handle with both hands and push it along next to the string I have put up to make sure my rows are straight. As the small metal wheels turn, seeds are dropped into the little ditch that the seeder has made. The soil falls back over the seeds as I push on. Since this is a weekly routine, I have had many chances to make mistakes and improve over time. At first seeding like this was really hard. Almost all of my endeavors in the garden have begun as challenges, but by repeating these processes over and over, I have learned and improved a lot.

I finish the lettuce and seed Asian and specialty greens, such as minutina, amaranth, kale, mustard, and tatsoi. Since May we have been seeding beans, beets, and carrots every other week. This is our last week of this. We still have more than two months left in the season; this planting won't be ready until late September or early October. The cycles and routines of the garden involve this sort of forethought -- thinking not only of everything that needs to be done today, but also of what will happen weeks, months, and years from now as a result of current decisions. But the present is also important. Only from so many days spent with my hands in the soil can I even begin to know the land.

Although thousands of visitors pass through Shelburne Farms every year, it is only steadfast commitment to this one place that can bring about the farm's mission of cultivating a conservation ethic. Those who are committed to this place, especially the Webb family who began Shelburne Farms and are still an integral part of it, have helped the farm to evolve from a model agricultural estate into a working farm and educational resource. Transforming a beautiful old barn into a hub of activity where children come for field trips and school, bakers make bread, cheese is aged, cows are milked, families learn about planting seeds, and I sit to write this diary entry shows ingenuity, responsibility, and hope for a place. If every family had such a commitment to their land and home, I wonder how our communities would grow.

The mission of Shelburne Farms is not just to educate children and their families about the environment and agriculture in general or even to just show them what it is like on one specific farm. In demonstrating stewardship of this land, the farm inspires others to do the same in the places they love. I hope that visitors find wonder and delight in the natural environment of this place and take that back to their own homes. Education programs serve to illuminate the details just beneath the beauty that is so easily seen everywhere. Shelburne Farms has collaborated with the University of Vermont to bring the PLACE program (Place-Based Landscape Analysis and Community Education) to local communities. This combination of lectures and field trips teaches citizens about the natural and cultural history of their towns.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to get to know this place through daily activity and other exploration. I must confess, though, that after my apprenticeship ends, I will be moving on. While I don't want to think about that yet, I do think about what it is like to belong to a place and to be fully anchored and invested in it. My work in the garden and the time I have spent in this place have taught me the importance of a connection to a place and I know that in the future I will make this commitment.

Today I'll end with a quote from Aldo Leopold that highlights the mission of Shelburne Farms: "We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity. When we see the land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect. That land is a community is a basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics."