1. The sun is just cresting the row of trees at the far end of the upper
meadow, swelling the ribs of the greenhouse with golden light. Small veins of
condensation streak the taut, plastic hides as I walk slowly past on my way to
greet Fabian, who has no doubt been in the radish and salad beds since dawn.
The cold earth bites my wet, bare feet. He simply nods to me in greeting, handing
me a green plastic crate as we kneel in silence on either side of glistening, sagging
sugar-snap peas. His seasoned fingers flit in and out of the plants as if it were
second nature; I’m straining myself to keep up, yet eager at the challenge.
Although we don’t talk much, it’s okay, as the popping sound of peas pulled from
their stems consecrates the ritual—it is mornings we harvest.
***
After graduating from college, I developed the romantic vision of working
on a farm for a summer. I was born on a farm, so daydreams of idling about a
garden in golden afternoon light, or bumbling along on a tractor have become a
nostalgic form of homeward bound for me. After a period of travel, I found a
small “Demeter” farm in northern Germany where help was needed in the
Gärtnerei (garden). I was excited by the notion of getting onto my hands and
knees and getting dirty, and, as my father is German, of a return to the roots in
more ways than one.
Established in 1924, and named after the Greek goddess of the harvest,
Demeter is an officially recognized brand of bio-dynamic farming based upon the
Anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (of “Waldorf” fame). It is organic
farming (of which Steiner is arguably the father of) rooted in holistic and mystical
practices, filling a cow horn with manure then burying it, and sowing according
to the phases of the moon included.
Given German stereotypes—rational, efficient, and rigid—the support of
these practices may seem contradictory. Yet Steiner rigorously attempted to apply
a clear, western-based thought process to spiritual questions. While no mystic
himself, he forged a path of “spiritual science,” a systematic approach that
allowed him to apply his philosophy across almost all aspects of human life,
ranging from child development to medicine to architecture.
In regards to farming, Steiner’s doctrine treats the myriad ecosystems
found on a farm—soil, plants, animals, humans—as a harmonic whole, a self-
sustaining organism. While Demeter regulations are slightly stricter than those of
standard organic farming, Fabian, the head gardener, explained that the
regulation process focused on a consultation of how the farmer might improve
their adaptation of idealism to modern economics. To apply solely biodynamic
practices and still run a successful, large scale operation appears mutually
exclusive—there simply isn’t enough time to work in accordance with natural
cycles and still succeed financially in the shadow of big farming. I’ve heard that
although many farmers seek to retain their ideals, the mystical practices remain
largely obsolete, while the Demeter brand remains.

2. During my first week on the fields, I felt a strong sense of purpose—that I
was doing something important, albeit slightly beyond my comprehension. I took
to the work earnestly, and there was plenty to do—the 22-acre plot required the
four of us (Fabian, two apprentices, and me) to pull at least ten-hour days. And
even then, there was the lame tractor gathering rust in need of repair, stretches of
fence sagging and porous, and weeds swallowing up the pumpkins, all of which
we simply couldn't attend to. This was no patch of grass in the backyard between
the sandbox and tree house where you might stick a few rods in the ground for
tomatoes to climb; no place to whisper to your favorite green pepper on
weekends. No—this was beds upon beds, three rows per, of neatly sown
vegetables and wild flowers distinguishable only en masse by color, their ranks
wavering sprightily in the omnipresent wind and tapering off into the distance.
While the weeds between rows could be plowed with a tractor, some crops
still called for some pretty arduous manual pluckery in the rows. Ultimately, I
came to enjoy spending afternoons alone on the upper field crawling my way
back and forth along the carrot beds. But the carrot beds, all 12 of them, were
accompanied by the peas, red beets, shallots, onions, pumpkins, tomatoes,
cucumbers, green and red cabbages, the wildflowers (of which the seeds would be
sold to construction companies for roadside beautification projects), leeks, green
beans, salad, radishes, zucchinis, and so on and so forth—Fabian had bitten off
more than we could chew. But when Manuel, one of the apprentices, told me that
Fabian ran the entire operation alone one year, I began to realize what type of
company I found myself in. Instead of the often entertained vision of tranquilly
dawdling about in a small garden, I had just stepped into a wholly other world—
this was the “cowboy” side of gardening.
Fabian was rough. In observing him, my first impression of gardeners was
that they were burnt and curt and played all hard on the outside—no filters on
their cigarettes, no time to talk about anything other than what the fields
demanded that day, nothing but dodgy eye contact and if they were to shake
hands you’d get mostly dirt. They drank coffee instead of water, ate fast so they
could get back to work, and spent more time looking for rain clouds than women.
These cowboy gardeners were the odd recluses that, due to the
industrialization of food, we’ve figured out how to live without. They were
hermits. They trusted the almanac, their experiences, and maybe another
gardener. And they were frustrated at the system—customers were too picky, the
organic label had sold-out to big industry, and no one understands.
Because they were loners, they lived solely for their work—their
“vacations” during the winter consisted of drinking more coffee and drawing
plans for the summer twenty times over and waiting; in the summer, they cared
more for their fields than their families. And they were definitely a little bit crazy
—while driving the tractor, Manuel would scream out lines from Moby Dick and
cackle madly in pursuit of a phantom white whale.

3. I quickly adopted their approach. I began tearing through the day-to-day
operations, hands whirring in front of me like blades freeing the choked cabbage,
and scoping out the fattest sugar snap peas a plant ahead while stripping the
plant at hand. I wanted to prove myself; wanted to saddle up with the rest of
them.
While gardening can generally be a forgiving process, a hands-loosely-on-
the-wheel-of-the-seasons endeavor, I was new to this world, and sudddenly living
solely for it. I found myself being tested by the toilsome nature of the work, not
physically—I’ve done some form of manual labor since my early teens—but
psychologically. Without steady input, my thoughts began to veer and grind into
one another until I wound up exhausted and with my mental shoes tied together
at the end of each day. Queue: identity crises, relationship gripings, the replaying
of the botched crunch time at bat during a state final, what people thought about
what I said at lunch, and pretty much every little thing you can imagine might
pop into the mind of a 23 year old who’s “supposed” to be climbing the corporate
ladder but is crawling around with the earthworms instead.
Someone to confide in might have helped, but outside of the garden crew
(which was more likely to shrug and spit than talk), the rest of the farm was not
the “community” that the sign on the front gate proclaimed. With little to no
feedback, validation was going to have to come from within, which was no small
feat—I would excitedly weed the beans one morning, but find myself frustrated at
stooping over the same bed a week later.
For Fabian, this wasn’t as much of a problem. He couldn’t get enough of it
all—one night he turned the tractor's flood light on and tilled the earth until well
past midnight. Yet it wasn’t the pursuit of financial success that drove his
ambition for more knowledge and experience (the bottom line generally
straddled red and black), but the infinite variations of plant types to experiment
with that spurred him onward, the succession of failures and triumphs that
thrilled him.
Thus, Fabian took to each endeavor with monkish focus (and Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas-like chain-smoking). While the apprentices tended to
wear knee pads when weeding, Fabian preferred the old school of bare contact;
while getting some bone to bone with mother earth is no doubt vitalizing, I
viewed his stubborn practice with somewhat skeptical admiration and awe, as
they will surely cut short his number of days out on the fields.
Over time, I came to see a different side of this wild, warrior-like
archetype. In The Education of a Gardener, Russel Page writes that “green
fingers are the extension of a verdant heart.” While that might seem sentimental,
it also corresponds to a certain type of empathy that I witnessed in Fabian—he
was very good at recognizing what a plant needed. For adept gardeners, I
presume this is intuitive, and based upon experience. For me, well, it wasn’t—
propping a newly planted and listless cabbage in my hands one hot afternoon, it
was like I was handling a crying newborn, and the usual trick of just shaking the

4. thing until it quieted down wasn’t working (let’s just say my father instinct isn’t
quite fully developed). Sensing my dismay, Fabian wandered over, and took up
the drooping plant next to mine, before smiling and calmly explaining that I
shouldn’t worry—“just limp, but they’ll be alright.”
But it’s not all feelings. Harvesting carrots one morning, I yanked out three
all wound around one another, like lovers playing an underground round of
twister. I generally find carrots downright hilarious, and laughed aloud,
presenting my trophy to the rest, upon which Fabian stormed over, cursing the
apprentices who had apparently failed to till the earth deep enough, and who had
sown the seeds in too close proximity, yet again. After calming down, he surveyed
the swaying, seemingly grinning green tops like a cook contemplating his next
move after tasting a stew—one who knows not only which ingredients
compliment one another, but also exactly how they chemically react in order to
achieve the envisioned taste.
One day I found him scratching his head, his cigarette hanging limply like
a fuming piece of grass between his lips, staring at a field of Indian cress that
simply wasn’t coming up. After work, I found him nose deep in one of the thick
volumes on gardening kept in the tool shed; I don’t know what he did, but the
cress eventually flourished. Fabian’s cress thrived and his carrots were generally
long and straight because he integrated the wisdom of the tomes with his own
instinctive touch.
What I initially interpreted as a certain toughness—the cracked hands,
rough voice, squint in the eye—only masked Fabian's intrinsic tenderness. I saw it
in how he gently scooped up his children when they came to visit him on the field.
I saw it when he smiled—that slight curve of the thin lips and crinkling of the skin
around his eyes. It was as if he couldn’t help it, but also didn’t quite know how. In
such moments, his face revealed his odd mixture of physical vigor, maternity, and
boyishness, which coalesced into a character not unlike what Gretel Ehrlich once
attributed to the cowboys in her life—“Their strength is a softness, their
toughness, a rare delicacy.”
***
In coming to the farm, I was seeking a sense of clarity. After the über-
stimulation of university and travel—running from one course to the next, head
buzzing with ideas; diving into the chaos of an Asian market to wave my hands
and feet in sign language with the locals—I hoped to allow the swirling motes of
thought and experience to naturally settle and crystallize into a stillness within
me. I wanted to go slow. Be in my body. Soak up some sun. Maybe eat some
strawberries.
In retrospect, I realize that I have a budding curiosity for gardening (which
I hope remains a part of me for the rest of my life), and that I associate two
primary feelings with the Gärtnerei. First is suffering, which I experienced due to
a mixture of the “communty’s” unwelcoming social atmosphere, and my inability
to calm down and untangle my thoughts before the next round of work. I fulfilled

5. orders rather than acting from my own initiative, which alienated me from
understanding the process on my own terms; some mornings it felt as though I
was pulling out my conviction along with the weeds. Second is the reverence and
wonder that I felt toward the teeming beauty I encountered daily: the autumnal
flare of peeling shallots in my hands, how July smiled and the apples blushed,
and the way the clouds reared and flexed before rupturing into an afternoon
thunderstorm. In moments like these, I felt alive and deeply grateful.
All in all, I’ve learned that I prefer a sense of intimacy with a few plants
instead of a greenhouse or football fields’ worth, and thus belong more to the
school of thought that Michael Pollan, in his wonderful collection of essays on
gardening, Second Nature, espouses—“So simple: grace in the garden but a form
of puttering.” I’ve learned that I’m no cowboy. A sheepherder, maybe. But no
cowboy.
During my last week on the farm, I laid beneath an apple tree, coming
down from another day’s work. I was sifting through memories, and savoring the
final warmth of a fading rose-chamomile light. Reaching into my pocket for my
knife, I found a number of seeds that I had absentmindedly scooped up while
tidying up the shed. I thumbed them in my palm, tempted to plant them in the
soil directly at hand. I thought about it for a moment, then had to smile, and
returned the seeds to my pocket. No, these—these, I would carry with me,
wherever I go.

6. orders rather than acting from my own initiative, which alienated me from
understanding the process on my own terms; some mornings it felt as though I
was pulling out my conviction along with the weeds. Second is the reverence and
wonder that I felt toward the teeming beauty I encountered daily: the autumnal
flare of peeling shallots in my hands, how July smiled and the apples blushed,
and the way the clouds reared and flexed before rupturing into an afternoon
thunderstorm. In moments like these, I felt alive and deeply grateful.
All in all, I’ve learned that I prefer a sense of intimacy with a few plants
instead of a greenhouse or football fields’ worth, and thus belong more to the
school of thought that Michael Pollan, in his wonderful collection of essays on
gardening, Second Nature, espouses—“So simple: grace in the garden but a form
of puttering.” I’ve learned that I’m no cowboy. A sheepherder, maybe. But no
cowboy.
During my last week on the farm, I laid beneath an apple tree, coming
down from another day’s work. I was sifting through memories, and savoring the
final warmth of a fading rose-chamomile light. Reaching into my pocket for my
knife, I found a number of seeds that I had absentmindedly scooped up while
tidying up the shed. I thumbed them in my palm, tempted to plant them in the
soil directly at hand. I thought about it for a moment, then had to smile, and
returned the seeds to my pocket. No, these—these, I would carry with me,
wherever I go.