Kate Shadwell: The Internship that Changed My Life

This is how a farm internship changed my life. In February 2020, I started my internship at the Eco-Institute in Chapel Hill. My duties consisted of basic farming skills like weed management, planting, harvesting, etc. This was an incredible experience for me because I got to learn so much more hands-on than what I would have learned in the classroom. This opportunity is also what led me to the realization that I wanted to expand my hobby of gardening into a career.

The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain is this gorgeous Oasis in Chapel Hill. It is a community living space owned by Meg and Tim Toben that consists of a tea house, a small sustainable farm, and a Permaculture school. They offer a garden co-op experience for locals that want to learn farming/gardening skills and as well as access to fresh local produce. This unique way of marketing a farm focuses on educating people on how to start and manage their own backyard garden through hands-on experiences. My duties as a Garden Intern were to help facilitate the garden co-op. This meant my job was very education-based as I was teaching the co-op members how and why we were doing the tasks assigned.

I had some prior farming knowledge before this experience. I worked on a small backyard permaculture farm for 2 summers and took a permaculture class with Anne Spafford. While these were great introductory experiences, The Eco-Institute really took my skills from beginner to advanced. I learned how to grow new crops like mushrooms, sweet potatoes, and leafy greens as well as learned common care practices like tomato pruning and potato mounding. It also connected me to fresh produce and taught me the importance of knowing where your food comes from. This is what really motivated me to further my environmental advocacy through sustainable agriculture and connecting communities with fresh local produce. A lot of the lessons I learned through my experiences were only amplified with COVID. I was fortunate enough that farmers are considered essential workers so I was able to keep my farm internships through the craziness of COVID. When everything fell apart around me in March and April of 2020, the garden co-op at the Eco-Institute was the only consistency in my life and I am beyond grateful for that. With a few changes to keep ourselves safe, we kept farming and we kept teaching through the pandemic. For a lot of us, it was the only escape from our homes and screens. As grocery stores emptied in March, a lot of people locally and internationally realized how important it is to be connected with their food. Home gardening exploded as more and more people wanted to grow their own food. Seed companies set record sales and some even stopped selling small seed packets for homesteaders in order to save seeds for farmers. A lot of our co-op members started their own backyard gardens in order to reconnect with food and the earth.

One of my favorite memories from this internship was when we had to prepare the farm for the last frost. This year, Wake County had a very late frost in the middle of May. Keep in mind, the last frost date for this area is usually a month before in mid-April. By May, many piedmont farmers are planting summer crops like tomatoes and eggplant. The 5 rows pictured above consist of tomatoes, basil, eggplant, and okra. All of these crops can not survive a frost without some type of protection. We were going to lose hundreds of plants if we didn’t do anything. The Thursday co-op session before the frost was a mad dash to protect as much as the field as we could. By mid-May, half of the field consisted of warm-season crops meaning we had to find plastic and frost cloth that could cover half the farm. We ran out of frost cloth almost immediately so we scrambled to find greenhouse scrap plastic and old tarps. The hardest challenge was to find a way to completely surround the tomato plants with trellis’ going through the middle. As you can see in the image, we ended up cutting strips to go on either side and connecting them with staples or clothespins. This served to be quite a challenge due to high winds that day blowing away a lot of our hard work. When we ran out of plastic we took old plastic nursery pots and put them over plants, and when we ran out of those we had to just hope for the best. We left that Thursday praying that all of our hard work would pay off. By the Saturday session, the frost had come and gone and we spent all day taking off all of the frost coverings. Luckily most of our crops made it and only a few were frostbitten. By the end of the day, the farm looked as if nothing had happened and life moved on. While writing this blog post (November 6th) I am still at the eco-institute, but will only be here for a few more weeks until my last day on November 21st). From the 10 months of being here, my career goals changed from wanting to do something within the ETM major to finally realizing my dream job and changing my career plan to owning my own sustainable farm. Not only did this internship flip my career goals, but it also taught me a lot of life lessons. I learned that you don’t need a community to live, but a community will make you stronger. I learned that you might spend one day stressing over something and it feels like the end of the world but life moves on and that stressor will one day be forgotten. And I learned that even the ‘weeds’ have importance. I have really valued my experience at the Eco-Institute and I look forward to taking what I’ve learned with me into my career and my life.