Many of you may remember the adorable Maria, Farmer Ric’s intern at Sol Harvest last year. Well, Maria’s year here has ended and she is on to big and exciting things. (P.S. Maria, we miss you! When are you coming back to say hi!?), and now there are two new interns on the farm.
Meet Ian and Zoe – they started their Sol Harvest internship a little over a month ago, and here they are with the lettuce seeds they started as their very first project at Sol Harvest, getting ready to transplant them into the hoophouse. This was their first “seed-iversary”!
Both Ian and Zoe say they are having a great time working at Sol Harvest so far. They love working outside and being on the farm, and getting to know each other and Farmer Ric. They say everyone on the farm is super-cool (well, we could have told them that!) and they love how much responsibility they are already entrusted with. Zoe says Ian is Compost King, for example – compost is his project – and she is the Herb and Flower Liaison. Anything that needs to be done with herbs and flowers goes straight to her. Yay, Ian and Zoe! We love the work you do!
Zoe is originally from Albuquerque, and is getting back to her roots (no pun intended!). She had been living in New York, but she didn’t like the fend-for-yourself attitude of the city. She missed the feeling of community she had here and the sense that when a neighbor needs something you help them out. She likes farming for that reason – it teaches you to be self-sufficient, how to do for yourself and others. “If something goes wrong,” she told me, “you have to figure it out yourself.” She likes that, she said, because “you can’t find everything in life on Google.”
Ian is also from Albuquerque, and comes to us from La Montanita Co-op (one of our favorite businesses – the CDC helps us connect us to a lot of local vendors). Ian is here to learn more about sustainable farming, because his passion is in connecting, advocating, and sharing knowledge about sustainability. His favorite part of the internship has been doing tours and workdays with students and other members of the community. If a group of 22 students come out to the farm, he says, and one person leaves saying, “Cool! I want to be a farmer!” he considers that a big win – for the same reason he decided to come to Sol Harvest himself: “Because the world just needs more farmers.”