Here are a few glimpses of our first two weeks interning at Common Harvest Farm.

The door into our cabin after one of the many snowfalls.

The building on the immediate left is our cabin. The building on the right is the kitchen.

The composting toilet.

Sarah watering in the greenhouse

The new machine shop where we worked during most of our second week.

Ben has been stacking many logs since we have been burning a lot of wood in the greenhouse.

A little flower plug that will grow to decorate the farm this summer.

The homemade yogurt maker.

Pizza for dinner in our 40 degree kitchen!

Good morning Ben.

Sarah handing 1 of 400 pieces of wood one at a time up to Ben.

Ben's stacked lumber piles...and this was only 1/3 the way through. 

Weeds.

Maple Syrup

The sweet, amber colored sticky substance, maple syrup. We walk out to the edge of the farm to a grove of trees. Maples interspersed with Black Ash and Oak and Birch. At the base of each Maple tree sit a couple 6 gallon white buckets connected to the tree with plastic tubing.

The tap is bored into the tree and acts as a little funnel for the clear water-like liquid to drain into the tube and eventually into the bucket.

A drop on the tongue is a cold burst of slightly sweet sugar water with a hint of earthiness. We check every bucket, a couple are completely empty, most are half full, a few are almost overflowing. The liquid is combined until we have ten full buckets of sap.

We replace the empty buckets to the trees that had the most sap flowing. 52 gallons ready to cook. Dan, our boss and lead farmer at Common Harvest Farm pieced together some of his scrap metal to makeshift an outdoor stove. Set on top is a heating pan that holds about fifteen gallons as well as a smaller prep pan.

The goal is to keep the fire burning hot so the sap boils, letting steam roll off. The level in the pan goes down. We keep adding until every bucket is empty. The color slowly changes from clear to amber as it gets closer to what we know maple syrup to be. 

To speed along the process, we occasionally stir the sap with a large metal paddle. When the pan is a quarter full, it is drained into a large kettle to be brought indoors to an electric stove. Just like making caramel, the temperature needs to be tightly controlled, the syrup can turn to hard candy in just a moment. 

Dan finished the syrup and left us a surprise jar on our table!

The Start.

Moving day came. We loaded the essentials into our car and hit the road out of the city. It was a gray, dismal day but the anticipation of what was just down the road for us lifted the gloom. We arrived. It had been months since the last time we visited this land, this time knowing a longer stay is ahead of us. We walked through each building, reacquainting ourselves. The items we recently packed into the car were now unloaded into our humble little cabin, home for the next seven months.

Our little farm cabin

Day one. The ground is still frozen which has caused a lake to form right up to our cabin. We walk across the temporary makeshift bridge to get to dry land. Twenty steps and we are to our kitchen. There is nothing like breakfast in 40 degrees to wake you up in the early morning. The words of Walter Brueggemann open our day in prayer, "We confess that we are set this day in the midst of your awesome, awful work." The prayer goes on to speak of God's imagining and forming and evoking and asking for our day to be full of joy and well being and newness. "In the name of your decisive newness, even Jesus. Amen."

Lakefront property! And our makeshift dock.

Welcome to the greenhouse! Like a one two punch our noses are hit with potent aromas of rich dark soil followed by moisture laden air; then the true hit, fragrant new plant life. The summerlike heat envelopes our clothing layered bodies, whisking away any chill that lingered on us from the outdoors. 

In the midst of a winter that is holding on tight, there is this haven protecting new growth...bunching onions, beets, parsley, leeks, basil, lettuce. It is beautiful.

We learn the process of seeding. For the next many hours we put one tiny seed into its temporary home, this is the start to become something larger and more successful, soon this seed will provide much fruit. A good picture of where we are at, a temporary holding ground full of education and experience, allowing us to grow and prosper, and someday have our own farm to provide food for many people.

It is amazing that so much can come from something so small. An itty-bitty seed will become a 3 foot plant and produce somewhere between 10-40 tomatoes. This half table of flats, nearly 4,000 seeds laid in dirt, translates into one acre of tomatoes. Our prayer this morning resonates in my mind, the works of our Creator really are awful, in the sense that what we were part of today truly caused me to be filled with awe. Our request of joy and well being and newness for this day actualized into something much more than we anticipated.

The flats which contain the nearly 4,000 tomato seeds.