Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.
Even now, two days out, it's hard to collect and arrange my memories of this past week at Tryon Farm in a coherent manner. It was exhausting! It was National Pollinator Week, and the series of events for which I'd been helping prepare finally took place. Tuesday and Wednesday were a blur of last-minute meetings and arrangements, and on Thursday, the ball dropped and the events began.
On Thursday, TFI hosted a private educational event for foster children from Chicago's branch of the Lydia Home Association. The planned activities including weeding in the pollinator-habitat garden which a group from Lydia had planted the previous summer, a butterfly/bug hunt in the meadow, and a short lecture and honey-tasting given by one of the Tryon beekeepers. However, the butterfly hunt got rained out at the last minute, so the kids worked instead on pollination-themed craft projects in the barn. These Chicago kids were, for the most part, eager and rambunctious when faced with the unfamiliar scenery of the Farm, and the high-energy group approached the activities with a lot of enthusiasm. They were full of questions about the goats, the bees, the bugs, and the plants, bouncing from one adult to the next for the satisfaction of their curiosity. The field trip ended pretty abruptly when one of the kids broke out in a plant-provoked rash, which to his and the rest of the group's urban eyes must have seemed far more unusual and terrifying than it did to locals. I must admit to having a somewhat similarly outsized reaction to the nasty case of poison ivy which seems to be slowly engulfing me.
The next day, preparations continued, and a TFI-sponsored movie night in nearby LaPorte (which I didn't attend) drew a large audience. And then it was Saturday, the big day.
The day began with our Meet The Bees! event at the barn. Thanks to our collective efforts, the in-house local goods market, beekeeping demonstration, kids' butterfly hunt, and movie screening seemed to go off, for the most part, without a hitch. After running around helping to get things set up before the event started, it seemed I didn't have too much to do during the event itself. This turned out to be lucky, since the freedom from pressing duty gave me the opportunity to be present for a meeting between Ed Noonan and Gary, who is a builder and jack-of-all-trades who works for himself and at Tryon, and who is working on and supervising the eco-pool project. Gary and his team are transforming an old cinderblock storage shed across from the barn into a natural swimming pool, preserving some elements of the original structure, and it was very valuable and informative to me to hear him and Ed discuss the various concerns and decisions which need to be made in undertaking this project. We also arranged for me to be apprenticed to Gary on the project, as a part of this crew, starting tomorrow. I'm very excited to learn what it takes to build, to get my hands dirty and to get some practical skills under my belt, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous, too. I'm sure I'll make a lot of mistakes at first, and I hope I can avoid discouragement and keep soldiering on. Stay tuned!
After the builders' meeting, I wandered through the ongoing Meet the Bees! event, trying to get as many photographs as possible. I'm no photographer, but thanks to the wonders of the digital age, I did manage to get a few passable shots. Here are a few of them:
After all the pictured activities, documentary Queen of the Sun was screened in the barn's loft, to a respectably-sized crowd. A discussion followed the film. For me, this time and the later, post-event afternoon, provided some space to help in the clean-up, count the market's profits (a final number is still undetermined, but we did much better than expected), get in a little rest, and water the plants.
Around 5:30, I went over to the nearby Holy Macaroni Cafe with local organic farmer and (to her surprised discovery) Tryon volunteer Sacha to begin setting up the Pollinator Dinner. Set-up went very smoothly, and the guests began filing in after seven. I enjoyed a delicious plate of vegan fare sourced from local pollinators and friendly dinner conversation with keynote speaker Jennifer Hopwood and her husband Tim. Jennifer was there as a part of her work with the Xerces Society, an organization devoted to saving invertebrate species from extinction. Her speech was tailored to the issue of pollinator extinction, for the occasion, and like everyone in the audience, I found it very interesting and informative. We learned, among other things, that the recent and ongoing honeybee population collapses can be, to some degree, compensated for by individual efforts to encourage native pollinator populations.
All in all, it was a successful and rewarding National Pollinator Week festival. I look forward to my debut in construction this week--I'll keep you posted!