This week is my last week at Growing Home, so naturally, I have been taking more time to pause and reflect on my CAPS journey. Last week, I spent time in our Learning Garden which serves as a hands-on experience for kids to touch and taste the produce we grow. The garden is the responsibility of my department to maintain, so I’ve spent a lot of time in that space over the summer pulling weeds, pruning beets, and harvesting all kinds of vegetables: tomatoes, radishes, green garlic, kale, swiss chard, and a few strawberries, (getting to sample a few along the way, of course). While working in the garden, I was surprised to see how tall our pea plants had grown from when we planted them a few weeks after I started my internship. These plants, which were once pea-sized seeds, had climbed to nearly 3 feet in just a […]

Living in a new place can be an exhausting process of navigating the unfamiliar. The first few days are usually filled with trying to get comfortable in a new space. For me this included finding where to buy groceries every week, the route I would take to my internship every day, and a good, nearby coffee shop. These small forms of comfort and routine help create the space for an unfamiliar place to become a community. On the morning of the first full day at my internship, the crowded processing room was full of applause, as everyone celebrated accomplishments and got motivated for the day. During the morning meeting we discuss the theme of week, which for my first week was “community”. As a result, I spent time that week reflecting on community and what it meant to me in the context of my recent, unfamiliar surroundings. In new places, […]