Gathering Ground is getting in the swing of its first full season at the Aznoe Farm. In mid-April, the hybrid education nonprofit and market garden welcomed a Farm Manager, Becca Boogert, and an inaugural pair of full season interns, Ava Anderson and Christina Eisenman. I’m one of those interns, Ava Anderson, and I’m already falling in love with Washington Island’s beaches and tall stands of trees after long workdays alongside the rest of the Gathering Grounds team.

I’m originally from the college town of Ames, Iowa, and I’ve been surrounded by a corn- and soy-focused form of industrial agriculture my entire life. While I love the Iowa landscape, I was never drawn to farming before I came to the upper midwest for college. I recently graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton with a degree in Environmental Studies where I helped lead the student-run Sustainable Lawrence University Garden (SLUG). There, I gained confidence bringing people together to do the work of farming a quarter acre. Through working in a garden focused on the local community and learning about alternative methods of agriculture in the classroom, I started thinking that I would like to farm… but only if it was focused on feeding local people and protecting the water and soils that sustain us and the crops we eat.

Gathering Ground is already giving me new experiences in boots-on-the-ground market gardening with an organic, on-site soil fertility-building focus. Here at Aznoe Farm, my coworkers and I are busy sowing weekly to ensure we have crops to sell to the community all summer long. An important part of the Aznoe Farm property is our growing roster of protected growing environments that prolong the growing season. In the past few weeks, we’ve raised both a caterpillar tunnel and a high tunnel then planted each with crops ranging from carrots to broccoli to sunflowers. We’ve spent hours sowing and planting onions, lettuce, and other crops into the newly tilled and shaped field, often stopping to remove giant rocks pushed up to the surface by winter soils expanding (one of my favorite fun facts so far!). We’ve been busy building up the infrastructure of this new farm!

In between our big projects, our farm manager and the other intern and I have settled into the daily rhythm of opening and closing the hoophouse full of greens and seedlings. The hoophouse is our most controlled environment on the farm, and just last week harvested our first round of arugula, lettuce, and spinach. At the end of harvest day we proudly made a run to Mann’s Food Store to see our product on the shelf. It’s a pleasure to see Gathering Ground greens in the grocery and know each bite of that food only travelled some 3 miles from soil to consumer.

I’m excited to be a part of the team shuttling local food across Washington Island and I’m excited for a summer of sharing meals, staffing the farmer’s market, and swimming in Lake Michigan after long days of farm work.