Every year our BLAST Interns go on a Dig In, during which they travel around New England and learn about many different parts of our food system. This entry recounts part of this year’s trip.

Having slept through a rainy night at the Good Life Center, the Harborside, Maine homestead of the late Helen and Scott Nearing, we awoke to help the Center’s steward, Bob St. Peter, in the garden. We set up the major posts for a new fence to protect the garden by digging two-foot-deep holes, inserting the 8-foot-tall poles, and filling in the holes with stones from the beach to secure them. The morning was drizzly and muddy, and after washing up and preparing a trail lunch, Bob led us on a mushroom hunt in the woods behind the homestead, which eventually led us to our next destination; Eliot “the man” Coleman’s Four Seasons Farm. We ate our lunches on a hill, overlooking the farm and Eliot’s greenhouses, and talked to Bob about how he decided that he wanted to live sustainably.

Eliot, famous in the world of organic agriculture for developing methods for growing year-round in the North East, gave us a comprehensive and very enjoyable tour of his farm and greenhouses. He showed us many of the tools that he has developed over his career as a farmer garden, many of which have completely revolutionized the work done on his farm, while we weeded the flower garden. One example of a really interesting tool that Eliot developed to make farming more efficient is a bed-flattening, seeding, and seed-covering hand-held tool that plants 12 seeds across a 30-inch-wide bed with just one time back and forth on the bed. We were extremely lucky to be able to spend four hours with a man who has influenced the world of agriculture so deeply.

We walked back to the Good Life Center, after having learned a new way of shelling peas from Eliot. The BLAST Interns frolicked in the fields, playing some soccer and comparing their ever-growing muscles. For dinner, Bob and his wife, Julie, prepared an amazing soup, composed primarily of vegetables from their garden. We ended the day sitting around the dinner table and chatting with Julie, their daughter Luna, and their apprentice Joel.