I get up early to harvest vegetables in the fog. I cultivate and irrigate and crawl around in the dirt all day. I'm a young farmer from New England. I studied Human Ecology on a small island off the coast of Maine and am fascinated by the dynamic relationships we form with our surroundings. I enjoy working long days in the sun, getting dirty and observing the cyclical magic of the natural world. I also love getting cleaned up and dancing hard to live music.

Sculpting Earth. Growing food and flowers. Teaching adults how to do the same.

I moved to Santa Cruz from Vermont a few years ago for an apprenticeship in ecological horticulture at ucsc. After the apprenticeship, I was hired back to work on the farm for another year.

Now that my year working at ucsc is up, I'm working on a small, diversified organic vegetable farm, traveling up and down the coast visiting friends and scoping out other small farms and communities. I live and work in cooperatives with like-minded, ambitious people.

What I really want is to meet a lumberjack and homestead out in the woods. Or someone who could get rid of everything, and travel the country in a motor home for a year.

Making things grow.

Getting the party started.

Living an exceptionally bucolic life.

That laugh that builds and won't quit.

Drop City by TC Boyle is my favorite book.
Fup the fable by Jim Dodge holds all the wisdom I care to gain.
The Secret Life of Plants is also a rad book.
Sunflower Sutra by Allen Ginsberg is my favorite poem. I also dig Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder & Pablo Neruda.
I read Wendell Berry, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, & Terrence McKenna, I think Joseph Campbell was smart as hell, and I like romance novels and David Sedaris on buses and airplanes.

If I could choose one song to play every time I walked into a room, this would be it: Mojo Fix by Martin Harley
https://soundcloud.com/martin-harley/martin-harley-mojo-fix?in=martin-harley%2Fsets%2Fmartin-harley-mojo-fix-full

I listen to
Kaki King, Van Morrison, Martin Harley, The Head and the Heart, Hall & Oates, The Punch Brothers, WuTang, Modest Mouse, North Mississippi Allstars, Allman Brothers, Pharohe Monche, Buddy Guy, TV on the Radio, Beruit, Burning Spear, Florence & the Machine, Adele, Battles,Tribe Called Quest, Sigur Ros, Primus, Saul Williams, Talking Heads, Thom Yorke & all things Radiohead, Tool, The Roots, Empire of the Sun, RJD2, PZ, Rufus Wainwright, Salmonella Dub, The Black Seeds, Ratatat, MF Doom, Ray LaMontagne, Railroad Earth, Pink Floyd, Outkast, Prefuse 73, Patsy Cline, YMSB, Tom Waits, Maps & Atlases, Mountain Man, Lotus, The Fugees, James Brown, Al Green, Jeff Buckley, Grizzly Bear, Gnarles Barkley, Charles Bradley, Parliament Funkadelic, Fourtet, Fiona Apple, Deer Tick, Danger Mouse, Crooked Still, Cat Power, Blackalicious, and the Grateful Dead. I go to Furthur, Ratdog, Phil & Friends, and Levon Helm (R.I.P!) shows with my dad.

I grow most of my own food, but consistently buy meat, cheese, and beer.

Human Connection
Lavender
Lemon Balm
Rosemary
Sage
Dancing

I think about seeds sprouting and the universe expanding.

The future, the fate of humanity, the senescence of sentient beings.

Things that make me laugh, people I love.

Sometimes I wonder whether, when we die, our consciousness explodes and the fragments settle on everything outside our body. Maybe it's absorbed and incorporated into organic matter around us. Compost your soul.

Stretching out, making dinner, getting funky

I wish I could go back in time and be a Saturday Night live cast member in 1999

You've ever grown or made something just to give it away.
If you are aware of whether the moon is waxing or waning.
If you know how to work hard and pursue what feels important, even profound, to you.
If you can do this and simultaneously not take yourself too seriously. If life is mysterious in the right ways for you.
If you can relax into that mystery.
If you can laugh at new age shit.
If nature resonates in you.
If you don't have to feel cool all the time.
If you can dance hard.
If you love your life and your friends and are overwhelmed by our consciousness and our bodies and our planet and the whole crazy phenomenon of humanity.