A Tapestry of People, Place...& Carrots
Zoar Tapatree is a name we chose because it reflects the place we are--Zoar--and who/what we are--a tapestry born of our communion with the forest through tapping. That's a little lofty, but we mean it. We've dedicated ourselves to reflecting the voice of the forest and also the spirit of the souls in our lives. For the last many years, Paul & Jeri Haldeman have hosted interns through the WWOOF program (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). The interns stay in a house on Paul & Jeri's land, and spend time learning about permaculture, asparagus-tending, forest management, Whole Maple syrup production, plus any number of related projects that come up along the way. Paul was a "WWOOF-er" back in his late teenage era, and has been a wonderful mentor to the over 75 interns hosted thus far at the farm. They stay for a few days or a few months, and they all become part of our farm family. The reasons they come are as varied as they are. Some are traveling through, some are interested in sustainable agriculture, some are coming to practice their English speaking skills, some are simply looking for a change of pace in a hectic world. Paul nurtures them. He keeps the work varied, and also gives them the space to try their hand at all sorts of their own farming passions. This is part of the tapestry...letting their individual expression wend its way into Tapatree.
This spring, Sophie Marvin joined us. It turns out, life on the farm brought out her inner carrot farmer, and Paul helped her to create a space where that could flourish. Sophie is about to move on, and in this liminal space before her departure, she has shared a two part essay on her time with us. I asked her for a brief bio to introduce her to you, and this is what she has provided:
Sophie Marvin is a writer and a chef. Originally from Amsterdam, she has since lived in Frankfurt, New York City, a tiny caravan in rural southern Scotland, Glasgow, and most recently London, where she obtained a full degree in classical French cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu. Her academic background is in literary studies and cultural analysis (University of Amsterdam). After eight months at Zoar, she is soon to travel to New York City, where she will be writing a book about the farm and its community, as well as completing her first poetry collection, Homerton / Night Poems. She feels very much alive.
Read on for Sophie's essay:
Zoar Farm
Rodman, New York
September 2026
Part One: The Garden
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow”
- Amana Colony, Iowa
Some days ago I awoke with startling alertness to the changing of the season. The light was thin at my window, the birdsong less hurried and less familiar, the cool sky tinged with purple.
I sat upright in bed and pulled my blanket close. I breathed and listened, then grew a touch nervous being so still. A part of me wanted to disenchant myself, to open the door, step outside and find the weather just the same. Instead, I lit a candle and remembered the winter –
a winter as brilliantly cold as I’d hoped it would be; the winter for which I’d made my way from bustling, hectic East London to the edge of the Tug Hill Plateau. As the sun slowly climbed, I let it dawn on me that what I’d imagined from my room in the city really did come true – I ended a season here; laid to rest my tumultuous twenties under the quiet of snow and ice.
I celebrated my thirtieth birthday at Zoar back in May, and soon thereafter told Paul that I wanted to grow carrots. Half a blink later, we began clearing space for a garden where big knots of raspberry and blackberry brambles had fashioned their thorny domain. After much ado with various tractors and tractor implements, measuring, raking, broad-forking, and raking again, we were greeted by an open, sunny ¼ acre of land overlooking the farm. I planted two beds of carrots, and my dear friend Aydin trellised his cucumber plants along the north side of the fence. We collected many lengths and scraps of cardboard upon which to build wood chip paths, and led hoses from the nearby well straight up into the garden. We stretched a second, 8-ft tall fence – at considerable distance around the first, smaller one – to protect the plants from hungry deer. Between the two fences, we planted another four beds (and I’m certain there are more to come).
Day by day and bit by bit, we are furnishing this vibrant green home with all that it may need; yet looking back on the process now, I find it curious how hard work can nevertheless feel like magic. I was there for it, but can’t quite comprehend how tall and strong the new fence is, or how potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and, more recently, kale, lettuce, broccoli, broccoli rabe, bush beans, beets, cauliflower, arugula, and three varieties of kohlrabi have all come to grow there! My carrots are in lively company, and so am I. Zoar Farm burst into life in early spring, and now still you can almost hear every leaf, every blade of grass, every particle of the air hum with energy. The farm’s extraordinary stewards – Paul, Jeri, Deanna, and Emory – have given me every reason to continue seeking, trusting, and creating what is good in the world. Being here with them over the past seven months has restored peace to my anxious city heart; health and aim to my rushing body. The garden, precisely because it is always changing, has anchored me in the present moment. I learn that tomorrow is today, and that tending to a garden is one magnificent, humbling, dirty, sacred, and truly good way to spend it.
Part Two: Carrots
I’d have liked to begin by telling you about the poetic and rather particular symbolic value
of the carrot, but have come to conclude that none exists. Various sources expound on many
(all rather big and vague) spiritual meanings associated with the root vegetable that has come to occupy my mind and hands over the past months at the farm. Themes such as fertility, spiritual growth, divine timing, and patience, reappeared in many of my findings. Of course those are fine themes; in fact, they work well for me. But they don’t make for much intrigue. In other carrot research, I’ve learned that while the bright orange colour we associate with the carrot was indeed engineered by 16th century Dutch breeders, it is unlikely they did so in honour (or flattery) of Willem van Oranje and the Dutch Crown (rather, orange carrots simply sold better than their white and dark purple predecessors)*. Then (to add insult to injury!), what I believed to be carrots’ nutritional super-power – their ability to improve vision – turns out to be a myth stemming from WWII propaganda*. You live and you learn!
Anyway, what I truly like so much about carrots, and what made me want to grow them is
1) that they are delicious, and 2) that they reach deep down in the dark, where they grow in hiding, while their leaves, like thin green hands, dart frothily at the open air. Last week, my first carrots went to market. Pulling them up from the soil was at once terrible and thrilling. This poem by former poet laureate, Ada Limón, captures the contradictory feeling:
I Remember the Carrots
I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,
a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen
in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be –
the advance of fulfilment, and of desire –
all these needs met, then unmet again.
When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,
their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.
And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots
and carried them, like a prize, to my father
who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.
I loved them: my own bright dead things.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.
Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented
the contentment of the field. Why must we practice
this surrender? What I mean is: there are days
I still want to kill the carrots because I can.
The poem’s narrator is my kindred, for I too, in what I reluctantly call my adulthood, am both the child and her parent rolled into one. I too am safe sitting inside, invested in the promise of my own agreeability; already anticipating the inevitable drop and start in the endless cycle of desire and its fulfilment. But what about right now?, the child wants to know. What about desire and fulfilment free of time’s watchful eye? What about the immediate thrill of the bright dead things? The poem’s most poignant lines sit near its end: “Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented / the contentment of the field. Why must we practice / this surrender?” I love that question, though I haven’t always. Much stillness and stealth indeed goes into being agreeable. Exuberance, rebellion, curiosity, and brightness grow angry when hidden too long in the dark. They are necessary, and a joy – better have them out!
*On the origins of the orange carrot:
*One Carrot A Day Keeps the Optometrist Away?
“I Remember the Carrots” from Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Other reading:
On Bunnies, and Clark Gable eating a carrot
*Sophie, you will be missed! We will be cheering for you!
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