We have learned that trying to live and grow food in an ecologically conscious way that deepens a “right relationship” with the land often translates into the daily reality of a large amount of hard work and never enough hands to do it. That, combined with the eagerness of a lot of wonderful people to throw their hearts and souls into the farming endeavor, and our propensity to make friends, has meant that our farm has welcomed many woofers, interns, apprentices, old friends, and fellow travelers over the years. Many thanks to all of them for the creativity, spirit and hard work that you brought to the land, plants and animals in our little crevice of creekside valley land.
We are a small diversified, family & community farm. We grow vegetables, fruit, medicinal herbs, and have a few ducks, chickens and dairy goats. If the 3 projects below excite you, please DO apply. Expect disorder, complexity, no simple answers and lots of sweat and dirt.
A. CREEK RESTORATION: Drought, climate change, wildfire, two dams for city water usage, and suburban water usage habits have heavily impacted our local creek which has provided summer irrigation water for our crops. We are interested in low-tech, process oriented creek restoration practices.
B. MEDICINAL HERB GARDEN AND APOTHECARY: We grow a wide range of local medicinal herbs for our community. And then we take it to the next step. We gather, dry, process and create medicines for our local herb guild and mobile apothecary project.
C. NATIVE AMERICAN CORNUCOPIA: No one can live on leafy greens! We have undying excitement (and deep respect) for growing dry corn, beans, squashes (and all the abundance of the Native American Cornucopia). We experiment each year with drought hardy varieties.
If you would like to join in this experience, read on!
Application information for the Green Uprising Farm Spring/Summer Internships
A prospective applicant should be interested in living a somewhat rugged, close-to-the-land lifestyle with a wide range of people of different ages, experiences and backgrounds in a situation where our daily lives are intertwined with each other. We may be cooking together, sharing kitchen space, doing farm chores together, dealing with plumbing problems, milking goats, repairing fences or harvesting beets. One must always be open to lending a hand to do the work that presents itself as needing to be done that day – even if it is not the work you had planned to do! When irrigation breaks down we work to fix it. When a goat, duck, chicken (or person!) is ill we work to heal them. When a plant is struggling with disease or pest problems we try to assess the problem and brainstorm for solutions.
We approach our internship from the point of view of a community. The idea of community life is that we all share an interest in learning to live together in a joyful and productive way and we all enjoy care-taking the land, plants and animals and reaping the benefits of our work. All members of the community contribute a minimum of six hours of work weekly toward maintaining the farm community. We all participate in periodic meetings to facilitate trust, build strong bonds of communication and make decisions regarding daily functioning of the community.
Spring/Summer Interns are offered room, partial board and a stipend for 30 hours of work weekly. A prospective applicant to the farm community should truly enjoy hard work and learning about diverse aspects of gardening, care-taking orchards, goat dairying, herbal medicine, growing high caloric crops for greater self-sufficiency, canning and preserving, compost-making and soil fertility.
The internship application form can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dwGbDZNLtdPWyjaqtH90DRyR08Oc2Qk7RNVXWCEEqW4/edit?usp=sharing
Green Uprising Farm 