Hi! Farm season is starting and I’ve been busy planting seeds in the greenhouse for Star Apple Nursery. This is a new series I’m trying out here, where I will send a weekly letter documenting my time in the plant nursery. These will be more diary-like than my usual newsletters, and will likely be written in one sitting with minimal editing. I’m hoping this can be a space where I can bring my writing and land-based practices in closer conversation with each other. I’m looking forward to sharing more of my casual thoughts and some of the ~ emotional weather ~ I’m moving through each week.
I’ve never been very good at surrender, but I’d like to practice more. Sometimes, life gives me no choice. This past week, it felt like there wasn’t any time for overthinking or holding on tight. I had eye surgery on Wednesday, and before that I had many things to seed and transplant. I had to format more signs with descriptions of the plants I’m selling, and order more stickers for the pots. I had to attend to my freelancing and other contract work. I had set everything in motion, and now I simply had to let myself be carried forth by the momentum of it all.
This was helpful, in some ways, for my medical anxiety. Sure, my face was being cut open and my eye muscles surgically altered midweek, but the immediacy of plants and soil grounded me in the present. I did what I could—staying hydrated, lighting candles at my altar—but I couldn’t attempt to do more than that.
My face was successfully cut open and stitched back together, and the plants stayed alive thanks to my friends helping out in the greenhouse. It’s been a social past few days at the site. Once I was back on the weekend, my friends Wallace and Onion came to help me transplant. On Monday, Deja and Nicky helped me prepare for the upcoming plant sale. It was Nicky’s first time at the greenhouse this season, and she gathered dandelion greens, clovers, and plantain leaves to feed her tortoises.
I initially started working at the former Greensgrow Farm site in 2021 when it was still a bustling urban farm. Through a seedkeeping program led by Amirah Mitchell, a group of us helped establish a seed library on the site and grow heritage crops in the high tunnels. It was my first growing season in Philly. It was a luscious and idealistic summer—photos of my new friends’ faces framed by vining bittermelon and five foot-tall callaloo, the seed garden we built in a Fishtown lot, seed harvesting days where we stomped on hot peppers with plastic bags tied over our feet. I hadn’t gone on a date with anyone new in Philly yet. I hadn’t had my heart broken here, I hadn’t broken anyone’s heart. I was still so fucking depressed, but all my biggest seasons of loss were at least a year ahead of or behind me. My mind and my skills were expanding with every seed I planted and every class session I took with Amirah. I was meeting people I would soon come to love.
When I came back to use the greenhouse space two years later, after Greensgrow had closed, I joked that it looked like Apocalypse Farm. Picking through the debris, I found pieces of what we had created during that seedkeeping summer: plant tags, seed packets, the little pink plastic watering can. I visited the grandmother rosemary plant who lives in a corner of one of the high tunnels and I asked for her blessing. Other people are working on the site now, and random tools and pieces of metal are no longer scattered around. But it’s quiet, and my friends aren’t growing peanuts and saluyot in the raised beds or shelling beans outside the greenhouse on weekends anymore. This past Monday, Deja and Nicky and I sat in a row eating lunch on the edge of the high tunnel. It’s been four years since I met both of them and the rosemary plant. When dear ones come to spend time at the farm, I can feel the space being reanimated, and I’m reminded of everything that has changed since I first began learning from this site. None of the seeds or people I began to know four years ago have remained the same. We have all been shaped by disaster, changed by tenderness and care or their absences. We have adapted to the climate and what it demands of us. Yet even when we are unrecognizable to ourselves, the land welcomes us back again and again, holding us in our new and ancient names, our stubborn and raucous survival.
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This week’s song: “Ride on Time” by Christine Wiltshire
Upcoming plant sale: Star Apple Nursery and other local growers will be vending at the former Greensgrow Farm site on Saturday 4/26, from 10-2 pm!
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