Last week we said goodbye to my mom, Guin, who has gone home to Maine for the summer. She will be spending the next couple of months hosting a bunch of friends and family who come to visit her house by the lake. It is a wonderful place for a summertime vacation. While she was here, she had been spending lots of time with Cooper and I got to be a (nearly) full time farmer again. With one less set of hands and eyes, we must learn how to farm with a toddler underfoot and with little hands that can reach higher and higher every day. Randy has taken him for rides while I harvest, he plays with water while I work in the greenhouse, I have trellised tomatoes while he sleeps nearby, and he has come with me into the field to harvest a time or two. Now he is sleeping in the carrier on my back. Naps are to be resisted at all costs lest he miss something exciting.
Didn’t I just write a newsletter? This week has gone by in a flash. Harvesting has been keeping us very busy indeed. The spring garden is nearly cleared out. The last cabbages have been brought out of the field. Six hundred or so cabbages at three or four (or five or six!) pounds each…. I am glad to be done with all that carrying. Over half the beets and sweet yellow onions have been picked. We have started harvesting the carrots, too. Soon, the red storage onions will be ready to pull and put in the greenhouse to dry and cure. And we are still harvesting kale. But most of the spring garden is long done. Radish, mustard, arugula and lettuce beds are flowering and going to seed. We have some picking up and clearing out to do before the area can be plowed under with the tractor. The sooner the better to keep more weed plants from going to seed! Now that the zucchini, squash and cucumbers are coming in, they demand picking every other day. With all this harvesting, when are we supported to get any farming done?
The potatoes will be ready to dig soon, too. I am eagerly awaiting and dreading potato harvest in equal measure. I love potatoes. I love that our customers love our potatoes! But it is going to be a lot of potatoes. At least scrambling around in the dirt for tuber treasure is an imminently toddler friendly activity. If I can keep him from biting each and every one, that is.
