I spent Tuesday 4-8-14, and the evening of Monday 4-14-14, helping out on a friend's CSA farm near Baltimore, Maryland. I'm working on a diary about that given that I'm learning so much about responsibly grown food and its journey from seed to responsible harvest to table. I was so struck by some of the images taken on my phone and iPad that I'm posting a compilation together here in the hope your eye and spirit will be nourished as much as mine was. They are posted, for the most part in the order in which they were taken during the days.
While I have your attention, those of you in the DC/VA/MD area, DC Kossacks is having its inaugural picnic this Saturday, April 19th at noon on the National Mall. Please join us and help us build local community by adding your intrinsic voice. Kosmail this diarist for specific details and/or to join the DC Kossacks group.
Your visual feast is served below what is so obviously the symbolic representation of a healthy, moist earthworm returning itself to rich and friable, just tilled, earth...
"By the way, this one's pink."
Seedlings under lights project a sense of earnestness and striving to me. "Let me show you what I can be."
Green zebra tomato plants
Eggs, just collected. Notice the straw and that they haven't been cleaned yet.
Onion sets, hardened off and ready for transplanting.
Chickens have such intelligent looking eyes.
The plant embodiment of hopeful striving.
I love this rich image. The beauty of the accidental patterning of the straw is by itself enough, but no, we get more; notice the straw finished with its aliveness and the new life poking up through the finished one. Then there is the tomatillo that lived its life as it was meant to, but never was harvested and enjoyed. But look at what we see here of it. My iPad skill did not capture the golden light reflecting off the intricate remainder of itself, but know it was magnificent in its honest simplicity. Lastly, the strawberry plant poking up and greeting spring as it readies to do its 'art of strawberry deliciousness' thing another year.
Thank you pine tree.
Red tiller in late afternoon sun.
Meditation on acceptance. I wanted the rows I planted to be perfectly straight. The rows I planted are not perfectly straight.
A repurposed door. I don't know what it was in its last life. In this one, it is a beautifully striking henhouse door.
Trellis with moon at the close of a very good day. Thanks for coming along.