This morning I worked for six hours in the garden. I planted some mustard, pruned and tied up tomatoes, picked tomatoes, and forked and weeded. When it finally got too hot to be out in the sun, Kevin and I went to the creek. We took a mask and snorkle and held on to the big rocks where the water rushes through little bottlenecks and watched the bubbles glistening in the sunlight, dappled through the leaves of a big Sycamore. I made a tomato and cucumber salad with basil and the vinegar our CSA customer gave us on Saturday. Where the water swirls around, you can feel the warm and cold water mixing. We had the whole place to ourselves for a couple hours. It was like being at a private resort. I found a great geode. I feel so lucky to have such a wonderful life.
We're starting our second 10-week period this week. I planted more chard yesterday, and the squash I planted late last week is already up. Hopefully the bugs will let us have a few more squash before it will suddenly be frost season again. The tomatoes are going crazy; we sold over 30 lbs of tomatoes at the market on Saturday! We also sold all our greens and a half bushel of cucumbers--all by 11am. The mung beans are up, and soon I have to start thinking about cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, Asain greens, lettuce, more kale...
Back to work!
Monday, July 18, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
the dog days of summer
I knew I wouldn't be great about keeping up with the blog. I was right. I'm doing better with our Facebook page, though. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, and I've been posting lots of pictures.
The Smithville market has been absolutely fantastic. There are some things that don't sell--fingerling potatoes and flowers. But Jason, at Evin's Mill, absolutely loved the fingerlings and wanted more than we have to sell. Everyone seems to love the Technicolor tomatoes and Lemon cucumbers. Delikatesse cucs, not so much. I think they look too much like the cucumbers the other vendors have. We've had several people ask about joining the CSA. We start our second 10-week period next week. So far I'm really glad we split up the growing season into the shorter periods. I'm a little nervous about adding more customers, but I worry all the time and it usually works out, so I'm just going to go for it.
Our Watertown customers make my heart sing. We took my mother to Nona Lisa Pizzeria, owned by Katie and John Smith, our CSA customers, and we enjoyed drop-dead-delicious pizza and a fiddle-accompanied birthday serenade. After that, we caught some world class music at the Blue Tomato, and Mom got another round of the birthday song from everyone in the house. It was great.
As for the garden: the squash are all dead. By next week we will have zero [0] producing squash plants. The vine borers wore us out. Brutal. We're putting in beans and brassicas in the wake of the squash. From my conversations with the other farmers at the market, we are not alone in our losing battle. The tomatoes are starting to pour out of the garden, while some of the cucumbers are beginning to slack off a little bit. Peppers are ripening. Onions and beets are all gone, their beds weeded and mulched, waiting for lettuce and squash to be replanted. The beans are kicking in, despite the Japanese beetles' best attempts. Our pumpkins and winter squash look better than they did a few weeks ago, and they are really starting to grow fast. The Joyners said their blueberries will be in soon. I could never express how excited I am for early mornings in their forest with my mouth stuffed with the best blueberries on the face of the planet.
We've had a heat index over 100 the last couple days, so we've been spending a lot of time at Redneck Riviera.
It turns out all the reading I did has been extremely helpful. However, nothing in any book could ever really prepare you for gardening in Middle Tennessee. This place is nuts.
Everyday I become more convinced that there is no more beautiful place in the world than right here. When I'm driving Glug Glug down Dry Creek and there are puffy white clouds drifting through the blue blue sky past the emerald green of these ancient hills, I can't help but feel like I live in a storybook. The sunflowers look like ladies with big yellow faces wearing green dresses towering over the garden. Queen Anne's Lace is covering all the fallow fields in a lacy white blanket. The Goldenrod and Ironweed are reaching their mature height--7 feet--and will soon be an explosion of yellow and purple. A lot of the rural roads look like paths through the jungle right now.
The garden looked like a jungle until Monday, when a writer from Wilson County came out to interview us about the farm. We were in a tizzy that morning, mowing, weeding, and generally trying to impose some semblance of order over the unruly tangle of green that our garden has become. And then today I got an email from the Watertown Gazette: a second interview request!
Things are going great. We couldn't ask for our first year to be unfolding any better. I am so grateful that this is my life. I love being here. I love farming.
And we still love our lovable loo!
The Smithville market has been absolutely fantastic. There are some things that don't sell--fingerling potatoes and flowers. But Jason, at Evin's Mill, absolutely loved the fingerlings and wanted more than we have to sell. Everyone seems to love the Technicolor tomatoes and Lemon cucumbers. Delikatesse cucs, not so much. I think they look too much like the cucumbers the other vendors have. We've had several people ask about joining the CSA. We start our second 10-week period next week. So far I'm really glad we split up the growing season into the shorter periods. I'm a little nervous about adding more customers, but I worry all the time and it usually works out, so I'm just going to go for it.
Our Watertown customers make my heart sing. We took my mother to Nona Lisa Pizzeria, owned by Katie and John Smith, our CSA customers, and we enjoyed drop-dead-delicious pizza and a fiddle-accompanied birthday serenade. After that, we caught some world class music at the Blue Tomato, and Mom got another round of the birthday song from everyone in the house. It was great.
As for the garden: the squash are all dead. By next week we will have zero [0] producing squash plants. The vine borers wore us out. Brutal. We're putting in beans and brassicas in the wake of the squash. From my conversations with the other farmers at the market, we are not alone in our losing battle. The tomatoes are starting to pour out of the garden, while some of the cucumbers are beginning to slack off a little bit. Peppers are ripening. Onions and beets are all gone, their beds weeded and mulched, waiting for lettuce and squash to be replanted. The beans are kicking in, despite the Japanese beetles' best attempts. Our pumpkins and winter squash look better than they did a few weeks ago, and they are really starting to grow fast. The Joyners said their blueberries will be in soon. I could never express how excited I am for early mornings in their forest with my mouth stuffed with the best blueberries on the face of the planet.
We've had a heat index over 100 the last couple days, so we've been spending a lot of time at Redneck Riviera.
It turns out all the reading I did has been extremely helpful. However, nothing in any book could ever really prepare you for gardening in Middle Tennessee. This place is nuts.
Everyday I become more convinced that there is no more beautiful place in the world than right here. When I'm driving Glug Glug down Dry Creek and there are puffy white clouds drifting through the blue blue sky past the emerald green of these ancient hills, I can't help but feel like I live in a storybook. The sunflowers look like ladies with big yellow faces wearing green dresses towering over the garden. Queen Anne's Lace is covering all the fallow fields in a lacy white blanket. The Goldenrod and Ironweed are reaching their mature height--7 feet--and will soon be an explosion of yellow and purple. A lot of the rural roads look like paths through the jungle right now.
The garden looked like a jungle until Monday, when a writer from Wilson County came out to interview us about the farm. We were in a tizzy that morning, mowing, weeding, and generally trying to impose some semblance of order over the unruly tangle of green that our garden has become. And then today I got an email from the Watertown Gazette: a second interview request!
Things are going great. We couldn't ask for our first year to be unfolding any better. I am so grateful that this is my life. I love being here. I love farming.
And we still love our lovable loo!
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