Fare thee well, Fair Flathead

The good stuff
We have accomplished all of our goals from the beginning of the summer and the garden is fully prepared for whatever trials this school year brings. Pathways are in the garden and the hydroponic is functioning once more. We even have a few bonus accomplishments---there are newly planted radishes in barrel-like pots by the greenhouse.

With your quick mind, you are probably wondering, how is the wind not tossing around the sawdust if it moved even large cardboard sections? Worry not, sweet reader. The sawdust is just small enough and the sprinklers just wet enough to create the perfect anti-storm. As an added plus, after speaking with 20+ lumberyards, we stumbled upon RBM lumber who contributed so much sawdust that the search abruptly ended. The pathways are complete, thanks to RBM, Lowe's, Home Depot, and Kalispell Lumber. Haley Johnson of the Kalispell Feeding Program actually hooked us up with that last one.

As our term of service is officially done, we move mysteriously and gratefully onto the next stage in our lives. In the distant future, we will reunite to form an intergalactic rocket army, but until then...Katie will be returning to NYU to continue her acting training; Jordan is headed back to West Virginia to work as a farm assistant.

The good people
There are many people who made our summer so successful. Robin Vogler, our site supervisor, is the person who got us here. She applied for Summer VISTAs, was our final interviewer, and is the reason that there is a hydroponic system and a school garden to begin with. She has a vision and we are the extra pairs of hands that make it happen.

Another person we want to thank is Crissie McMullan, executive and creator of Grow Montana and Montana Foodcorps. She is an excellent resource for the answers to all of Katie and Jordan's respectively stupid and intelligent questions. She also gave us our Warholian 15 minutes by inviting us to guest post on the Montana FoodCorps website. You can find an article by Jordan here and one by Katie over here.

There is Abby Zent at the Prevention Resource Center, too, who is Katie's supreme supervisor (and does the all important job of pressing the "pay her" and not the "fire her" button). She also proofreads and approves all of Katie's blog posts. In addition, up until mid July, Jared Schmidt, the 2011-12 PRC VISTA, was the first person to interview Katie and, after deciding she wasn't Hannibal Lector 2.0, made sure she didn't get lost on her drive out to Montana.

Countless Montanans have helped this summer. We applaud them eternally.

Auf Wiedersehen
The emotion Katie feels as she writes this post is a mixture of confusion, as she is discussing deeply personal mental workings in third person, and great sadness, as she knows this is her final post on somers-harvest. There will likely be another post in the autumn discussing the garden's yield and how far we surpassed our goal of 1000 pounds, but this is the last time she will post during her Americorps service.

How to best describe the pain inside her heart of hearts?

D:

Yes, that's it exactly. 

We will miss you, Montana, but who knows just when we might see you again. It might not be until next summer or the next decade, but we will always carry your beauty in our memories and your soil under our fingernails.

Until next time!