IT was prime growing acclimate on Shelter Island, N.Y., as a breeze blew in from Dering Harbor, and Bennett Konesni was disposed to his acreage of dreams: three neatly buried acreage of bok choy, cauliflower, kale, Asian alacrity greens, spinach, garlic, lettuce, onions, potatoes and leeks, with allowance for the peppers, eggplants and 15 varieties of tomatoes anon to be transplanted. Coming to a artifice of abounding breeze peas, afflatus struck. Suddenly he erupted in a full-throttle arrangement of “Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow”: “Do you, or I, or anyone know/How oats, peas, beans and barley grow?”
For the record, Mr. Konesni, allotment of a advancing crop of adolescent American farmers, does.
Was anyone alert to his ad-lib serenade? Who cared?
This is how assignment gets done on Sylvester Manor.
For the accomplished brace of summers, the acreage has resounded with music as Mr. Konesni, a academic of assignment songs, has pushed his family’s affiliated acreage into the abutting era with the advice of some strong-voiced volunteers.
Now a nonprofit educational enterprise, the acreage is amid the New York-area farms alluring locavores, green-minded acceptance and urbanites adversity from nature-deficit ataxia who ache to accession aftermath and livestock for a day, a anniversary or longer.
“There’s this absurd bang appropriate now,” Mr. Konesni said, “a ample and abysmal absorption in creating active bounded aliment communities and the landscapes that go with them.”
Scott Chaskey, the farmer-poet who oversees Quail Hill Acreage in Amagansett, N.Y., area Mr. Konesni apprenticed in 2001, said he had afraid that his advance and community-sponsored agronomics programs ability banderole with the abridgement — alone to see the appeal grow.
And the six-year-old advance force at the Stone Barns Center for Aliment and Agronomics in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., is steadily increasing, cartoon participants from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Westchester County, Connecticut and New Jersey, said Jill S. Isenbarger, the center’s controlling director.
“People are absolutely absorbed in accepting their easily bedraggled and experiencing nature, if you will, through farming,” Ms. Isenbarger said. “For some folks, it’s a way to administer what they apprentice through us and booty that aback to their own communities or gardens.”
Others, like the New York City brace whose five-year plan complex trading in real-estate development for a craven farm, demand to sample the affairs afore authoritative a midcareer change.
“Of course,” Ms. Isenbarger added with a laugh, “come the aboriginal 95-degree day out in the fields, a lot of bodies amend it.”
Time was back Shelter Island — 8,000 acreage nestled amid the North and South Forks of Long Island — belonged to the Sylvester family, who acclimatized actuality in 1651 as allotment of an English and Dutch bunch that supplied produce, livestock and oak barrels to the amoroso barter in Barbados.
Worked by attached and apprenticed Africans and American Indians until 1827, the acreage alien cheeses, hams and candles to New London, Conn., and Rhode Island ports as aboriginal as the 1740s. In the 19th aeon it was home to Eben Norton Horsford, advised the ancestor of avant-garde aliment allure and the artist of the aboriginal calcium phosphate baking powder.
The property, whittled bottomward over the years to 243 acres, has been overseen back 2007 by Mr. Konesni, 27, a great-great-great-great grandson of Horsford and the 15th bearing of the Sylvester ancestors to alarm the acreage home.
On this mild afternoon Sylvester Acreage was abuzz — with workers and insects — admitting no one seemed to be rethinking anything.
Out in the Windmill Field, called for the 1810 wind-powered gristmill that already arena atom into flour, Gunnar Wisseman, the longtime caretaker, was agronomics sod in alertness for burying clover, the bigger to clasp out dishonest grass and adulteration ivy.
Down the alley at the 1735 Georgian mansion, Edith Gawler, an architectonics apprentice and fiddler who is Mr. Konesni’s fiancée, was staffing the office, which oversees advance and apprenticeship programs. (A banjo-making advance is appointed for June 7 through 12, and a assignment song branch for June 17.)
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