INTERNSHIP POSITION

Organic Market Garden Intern – Foragers Farms
(in partnership with Headwaters Community Farm)

Position: Market Garden Intern 2021
Type: full-time includes accom. on the farm, meals, stipend, more (see below)
Farm: Foragers Farms
Location: Northumberland County, near Cobourg / 40 min E of Oshawa / S of Peterborough

Foragers Farms, is an exciting ecological mix of organic market gardening and wild foraging. Gardeners Tyler Davis and Erin Bodashefsky use the latest ecological practices to cultivate and harvest vegetable crops for use on-farm (feeding family and staff, selling at farmgate market, providing ingredients for cooking classes) and off-farm (farmer's markets, CSA program, Reko and retail outlets such as health food stores and restaurants).

Situated in the rolling hillsides and forested lands of Northumberland County, we lease land from Headwaters Community Farm and Education Centre. Headwaters works with the public to promote sustainable methods of farming, healthy eating and homesteading skills.

Internship Overview

Our Full-time Garden Intern position is a great program for people who are interested in becoming fully immersed in an intensive market garden farming operation. During the course of the season you will experience hands-on training from start to finish, from prepping garden beds, to saving seeds for next season and every stage in between. You will learn how we provide food and small-batch wildcrafted medicinals for our CSA members, farmers markets, and restaurants/retail stores.

We are part of the CRAFT organization (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) and through this organization each of our interns will have the opportunity to visit and learn from the farms in our area who are in the CRAFT network.

What We Are Looking For In Our Intern

We are looking for someone who is mature and genuinely seeking an ecological path of working with plants and living and working on a farm. Although the work is hard with long days outside with the elements of nature, we hope you will have an appreciation of and gratitude for the rewards this work brings and find love in what you do. We are looking for people with a can-do attitude, excited to experiment and learn through experience, working with others as well as spending time alone.

We encourage you to express your needs, intentions, ideas and philosophies and be willing to resolve conflicts or differences of opinion through good communication. We expect you to be a friendly and informative communicator to both volunteer workers and with customers.

A Week on the Farm

Things change through the seasons but once the CSA begins in May our weeks have a fair bit of structure to them. For an intern the schedule would look something like this (days change based on weather, demand and the ever changing flow) 

• Tuesday: Every week Tyler leads a field walk to refresh everyone on whats happening in the garden. As a team we harvest, mix, wash, and prepare orders for delivery to restaurants/CSA/farmers market. Weeding, weeding, weeding! At our farm we hand weed when necessary or use hand tools and hoes. Planting and seeding are an ongoing task as well.
• Wednesday: we focus on planting, transplanting, and seeding in the market garden, greenhouse or starting new successions of crops in the nursery. On this day we also have/prepare for Reko (similar to a pop up market where people pre-order via facebook). We also try to forage a little bit on this day, weather pending.
• Thursday: Some harvesting for the Saturday Cobourg/Peterborough farmers markets and CSA pickup at the farm/farmers market, along with cover cropping, fertility, planting, and weeding.
• Friday: Harvest day 2 for the Saturday farmers markets and CSA pickup. Focus is also on the fields. We do weeding, bed-prep, trellising, and further planting is done. Plans are drawn up for the following week of work.
• Saturdays: On some Saturdays the intern is expected to be available for the Farmers Markets...potential for working independently on the farm. Sometimes the interns switch from being at market or on farm...in the past we have had one more drawn to the market and the other the farm so they didn’t rotate.

This internship is a training position. 45-50 hours a week (more during peak/planting season and less during harvest season), 5 days a week, May 1 to October 31.

Includes accommodation on the farm, 3 meals a day, $100 a week stipend and access to the programming delivered by our education centre.  
*Please note if you have special dietary needs than you are expected to pay for higher valued items (ie. nut cheeses, protein powders, etc).

To apply, please e-mail your resume and a brief covering letter to:
Foragersfarms@gmail.com
subject: Market Garden Intern

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