Nourishing the Community With Healthy, Organic Food

By Emma Martin

During summer of 2018, between my first and second years of graduate school at Virginia Tech, I worked as an Intern at Black Creek Farm in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Matt, the farmer, and Steven (also a farmer) worked long hours everyday teaching me how a chemical free farm works. In Virginia, average temperatures in the summer tend to linger around 90 degrees, and heat indexes made things even worse. However, I thoroughly enjoyed my time working on the farm. Despite the 30 minute commute from my mom’s house, I enjoyed the country roads leading to the small scale farm. I learned a lot about how to grow and harvest fruits and vegetables including:

Kohlrabi, bok choy, tatsoi, french breakfast radish, green beans, wax beans, fava beans, tomatoes, garlic scapes, red onions, green onions, shishito peppers, hard and softneck garlic, asparagus, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, eggplant, fingerling potatoes, sungold tomatoes, sunpeach tomatoes, pink berkeley (tie dye) tomatoes, okra, swiss chard, rhubarb, basil, turnips, beats, carrots, purple potatoes, tuberose, tumeric, ginger, strawberries, squash, kale, easter egg radish, arugala, salad mix (mustard, kale, arguala, tatsoi), microgreens, tokyo bekana, sunflowers, and leeks.

While working on the farm, Black Creek Farm’s arugula and salad mix started being sold at Elwood Thompson’s in RVA as well as served at many local restaurants including Mamma Zhus and more!

Some things I had to do on the farm included: hand weeding, setting up electric deer fences, moving tarps and carpets to kill weeds, harvesting and bunching vegetables in the mornings, removing bugs from kale leaves, trellising tomatoes, trellising kale, peeling onions, hanging garlic to cure, watering apple trees, picking crates of tomatoes, planting peppers, spacing out and planting different vegetables, cutting fabric, picking green beans with pruning shears, laying out drip tapes and irrigation lines, washing and drying salad and arugula, spreading compost, spreading cow blood, trying to keep the dam from breaking, getting stung by a bee on my birthday, chasing a cow down the road away from our crops, finding a tick on my chest, and much more.

I worked on the farm Tuesday-Friday from 8 am to 5 pm or 6 pm. In addition, I had the opportunity to work at the South of the James Farmers Market every Saturday from 7am until noon. Working at the farmers market every weekend was a great experience. It was very rewarding to see and speak with the people from the community who were buying the food I worked so hard to plant and harvest. Although we were not a certified organic farm, our customers understood and appreciated that all our food was organically grown. Getting to nourish the community with healthy, organic food was my favorite part of working on the farm.