Ava and compost

Ava's career as an organic farmer began eight years ago when she was eleven-years-old. She worked the till at a farmer's market stand in Cold Spring on Saturday mornings. Soon she was spending her summers on the farm and last year lived there in a trailer. Next year, she and another intern from the farm are starting their own organic farm in New Hampshire.

Ava with scythe

A skill Ava developed on the farm was how to use and sharpen a scythe. She said she learnt a great deal from watching eighty-year-old English farmers demonstrating their skills with a scythe on YouTube. The two scythes she now owns came from her father (not a farmer) who had them in a shed.

Brianna, volunteer gardener

Brianna and John. She is a volunteer gardener in Coffey Park, Red Hook; he is the full time gardener. They spent the morning with seven students from NYU spreading wood chip mulch round the Plane trees.

Gardener in large hat

We noticed the mulch used around his bit of the BBG, (herbs mostly, huge swathes of basil, purple sage etc) that looked very like soil. He told us it was Buckwheat hulls. Never seen a garden with fewer holes bored through the leaves of the plants... and they use no insecticides.

Shakespeare's gardener

Anne O'Neill manages and maintains the incomparable Shakespeare Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. It had been a long dry spell when we met her. "How do you get the water here?" I asked. "I carry the hose on me back." she replied.

Morningside Farmer's Market

He was loading up the unsold produce at the end of the day. His farm was in Kingston, NY and on Saturdays they had stands in Queens and Brooklyn as well as Harlem. He delivered and picked up from all three locations.

English gardeners

They were on their hands and knees as we past them in their front garden on Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, rearranging their plants in a neat and methodical manner. They had been in the USA since last October and they love it here. She is an engineer and he a school teacher. I was miserable because I was cold and had not been able to concentrate on our own gardening activities, that of buying plants at the wonderful Gowanus Nursery down the street.

"But this is a perfect English summer's day," he reminded me. (Temperature: 58 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Claire in the garden

Claire is in charge of the Summit Street Community Garden in Carroll Gardens, a job she inherited from the founder, who now is away quite a lot after she built a house in Santa Fe. This hot Saturday afternoon Claire was there with her friend tidying up and planning next year's changes. An exceptionally large rosemary bush, probably eight feet wide and five and a half feet high is one of the garden's features. As we admired it, she drew her secateurs from her pocket and clipped off half a dozen twigs for us.

I took a photograph with her friend by the rosemary but when she started talking about her life I got this one. Her hands, as we can easily see are never gloved. It is not only the dirt in her finger nails, but the way she has arranged her hands that drew me to this particular shot - one of many where her hands were in the picture.

After Barnard, trying to figure out what to do before graduate school, at the suggestion of an aunt she and her friend started Beastly Bites Animal Supplies. Later, after it became a success, they sold it. Now Claire describes herself as a community activist.

Adam the gardener

I was thinking recently who could play Raskolnikov. Twenty year-old actors today are too chubby. Adam is too old but he has the intelligence, and the leanness.

I wanted to take him and the girl he was with but she disappeared as we spoke. He tried to retrieve her from the store opposite but she would not be taken away from her shopping. Adam is a gardener and loves borage, as do we. He also dislikes (as do we) Beacon, NY, where he lived for a while but screamed for some genuine urban life and interesting people. So he is back in Bushwick doing lots of people's containers and gardens in Park Slope and around.

He has promised to come and see us in our Garrison haven of greenery and un-urbanness. Hope he does.

Rebecca, organic farmer

For two years, Rebecca and her husband Joe grew organic vegetables on a communal farm in Wappingers, New York. Every week from May to October we would buy their vegetables at the local farmer's markets. In the winter she would knit and make quilts and he would knit and make furniture. In September this year they told us they could no longer go on alone and were returning to his father's farm in Iowa to join forces with him.

Rebecca looked at the camera I was using. She said, "That's the most beautiful camera I have ever seen." It was a Rolleiflex 2.8E that I bought in 1955. It is the only camera that I love. I must be careful now because I have enjoyed the luxury of digital cameras. I have, a Nikon D40, and as excellent as it is, it is the wrong format for me and woe betide you if you over expose. The armchair life it gives you, not having to go to the lab, is habit forming.