Greetings from Against the Grain and welcome to the third week of the 2021 CSA!
Just like previous weeks, the customization period begins once this notification lands in your inbox (which should be around noon on Friday) and will end at 11:59pm on Sunday, June 6th. During this customization window, you can make swaps to your box and add extras. Pick up your box at your chosen location on Wednesday, June 9th. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to change pick up locations for the share that is currently open for customization, please email Harvie support to request that change support@harvie.farm. Always feel free to double check with Holly to make sure the change was made. It is so important to the farm that CSA members have flexibility in their pick up location.
If you'd like to donate your box, change your pick up location to the FARM Cafe and email Holly to let her know you'd like to share the love!
The newsletter this week is a profile of Lilia Machado, one of ATG's apprentices. We will be profiling apprentices through out the growing season in an effort to connect you more deeply with the people, whose hands and hearts, work so hard to grow the food that goes into your CSA box each week. Lilia's profile is brought to you by M Mueller.
To say that farming is in Lilia Machado’s blood would not be saying quite enough. Farming is in her heart.
Against the Grain Farm has been Lilia’s home for the past four months, part of a gap year between high school and college. Arriving on the farm on a cold and rainy February day, Lilia set to work with a will, raising seedlings, preparing ground, planting and tending and harvesting crops that would one day arrive in the first CSA shares. As well, she has tended the livestock, raising layer chicks, tending to the goats and dogs and whatever else walks about the farm on four legs or two.
Descended from coastal Portuguese farming folk, the sights, sounds and rhythms of farming come natural to her. Having spent every summer on the family farmland in Portugal she is well used to early mornings, the sound of the tractor, the memory of her grandfather paring peaches to eat, vinting his own wine, infusing the family aguardente (home made aperitif), while uncles sprayed crops or made compost. All these experiences made her into the warm, kind person we have come to know and love to share farm life with.
What brought her to ATG? A lot of hunting online, an interest in ATG’s posting on the ATTRA website—and a bit of luck. Her time here is sandwiched between work on a previous farm and her next gig at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, a place whose luxuriant flower beds and opulent greenhouses are familiar to her from frequent family trips she took there as a child.
As for her favorite place on the farm, it’s the pack shed. There in the bustling focal point of the farm, harvest becomes produce, work is spiced with conversation and order appears out of chaos. “It’s like a wrap-up of your homework,” she says with a teenage grin.
Though Lilia is the youngest of the farm apprentices this season, she fits well into the farm where she is appreciated and in turn appreciates the opportunity to experience a sense of community, not to mention farming knowledge! And perhaps it is a matter of her Quaker values, of which community is of great importance, but she appreciates the openness and even the vulnerability that comes with learning to live well within a small group. We are sure she will bring her loving attitude into the future!
We wish Lilia well as she continues her education by attending College of the Atlantic in Maine. There she will major in the single discipline the college provides, human ecology. How that will play out in her future remains to be seen, but she says it will include food—its history, justice, politics—and of course its taste!
Until next week, much love and happy eating,
Holly, Andy and the Crew at ATG
