I found out the other day that I’ve been officially sponsored to be a delegate to represent Slow Food Martha’s Vineyard at Terra Madre, the annual meeting of Slow Food International, which takes place in Turin Italy. I’ll be making the trip at the end of October, when things in the fields have quieted enough for me to slip away.

The things we islanders complain about are the very same things that make us stay – the rhythms and routines, the underlying sameness of a world without traffic lights or k-marts, the quiet of the off-season on a rock in the Atlantic. In some ways the world feels more finite here, more knowable. Slow Food makes sense everywhere, but here in particular it resonates.

That being said, in Italy I plan to wear clean clothes, eat fancy food, ask lots of questions, and have one hell of a good time.

I planted the sugar snaps in the least fertile area of the field. In mid-April I dug shallow two shallow trenches, hacking through sod and roots with a triangle hoe, and I backfilled with compost from the restaurant, which was rich and black and flecked with bits of egg shell.

It was the first thing I planted. I didn’t expect much. I put up a lame, cursory sort of trellis made of skinny oak stakes and scraps of old deer fencing my friend Jeff gave me and went about my business.

The peas have since determined that they love it here and have been growing like gangbusters, loaded with blossoms and pods. Every week I chase them with more stakes and lengths of twine as they pass three feet, then four, then five, climbing to the sun. The trellis looks like some sort of earnest and unfunny art installation, a melange of plastic netting and tangled string. Every week, the place is less of a garden and more of a farm..