Dear faithful readers,
As social media has changed, so have our blog posting habits! We are no longer using this platform.
Please find us on instagram @springvalleystudentfarm or facebook @uconnsvsf.
You can also find lots of information about the farm, and contact information for the current farm manager, at https://dining.uconn.edu/spring-valley-farm/.
Sunny wishes from the valley,
Spring Valley Farmers
all August, tomatoes in a steady splutter
through September. But by October’s
last straggling days, almost everything
in the garden was stripped, picked,
decayed. A few dawdlers:
some forgotten carrots, ornate
with worm-trail tracery, parsley parched
a patchy faded beige. The dead leaves
of potato plants, defeated and panting,
their shriveled dingy tongues
crumbling into the mud.
You have to guess where.
The leaves migrate to trick you. Pretend
you’re sure, thrust the trowel straight in,
hear the steel strike stone, hear the song
of their collision—this land is littered
with granite. Your blade emerges
with a mob of them, tawny freckled knobs,
an earthworm curling over one like a tentacle.
I always want to clean them with my tongue,
to taste in this dark mud, in its sparkled scatter
of mica and stone chips, its soft genealogy
of birch bark and fiddleheads, something
that means place, that says here,
with all its crags and sticky pines,
its silent stubborn brambles. This
is my wine tasting. It’s there,
in the potatoes: a sharp slice with a different blade
imparts a little milky blood, and I can almost
smell it. Ferns furling. Barns rotting.
Even after baking, I can almost taste the grit.
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| Picture perfect radish |
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| Searching for the queen bee |
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The one with the green mark is the queen!  |
