Sixteen years of formal education gives each year a predictable seasonal schedule. Months of class, a final test or essay, then summer: vacations as a child, summer jobs as a teenager.
I’m a year out of college now and this is the first time I’ve had no transition from a class-filled springtime to summer work. I’ve been at the Gazette since February, reporting on West Tisbury, Chilmark and a variety of other things.
When I was a student, I spent many summers farming, shaking off textbooks and tests to pick vegetables, half moons of dirt becoming near-permanent under my fingernails. I’ve farmed in the vineyards and mountains of France, in the community gardens of my hometown in Chicago and last year at Morning Glory Farm. It’s become, in some ways, my yearly ritual to mark the summertime.
This year, my ritual continues, just in a different format.
At the Gazette, the seasons are marked in part by a change in our coverage as the Vineyard expands, events pack the week and tourists flood in from off-Island. Reporting on agriculture works the same way. Reviving the Farm and Field column comes with a necessary attention to the summer crops that will soon arrive at the farmstands. Coming soon: strawberries, beans and brassicas, fresh chickens, herbs overflowing.
But I also hope to bring to the Gazette’s summer editions the voices of our Island’s farmers: the people who plan and propagate, plant and pick. There is a stunning local food system here, supported and sustained in a way you won’t find elsewhere in the United States.
That food system was on full display at the first farmers’ market at the Agricultural Society last Saturday. Even before 9 a.m., cars filled the parking lot and customers lined up just outside the perimeter of booths. There was live music, squealing children, vendors bartering eggrolls for produce.
I ate my first chive flower, from Fielder Family Farm, as Judith Fielder Leggett wove bittersweet baskets next to her herbs. Farmers told me how excited they were for the first farmer’s market, how the season was shaping up to be a good one. The flower girls at Morning Glory farm walked me through each early summer bloom: peonies, anemones, lupine, calendula, foxglove and half a dozen more.
“The community coming together is really great to see,” said Helen McGookey, the new market manager at Morning Glory. “It feels like the season’s kicking off, coming out of hibernation, everybody’s awake and excited. It feels really exciting to be here.”
Twice a week farmers markets, conversations with farmers, fresh produce that comes and goes as the season reaches its peak and recedes. Let this mark summertime.
Who needs school, anyway.
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