Confession: for the last week or so I've had a bad case of cheesy Christmas music stuck in my head. It all started a Sunday or two ago when I was harvesting tomatoes from our caterpillar tunnel, enjoying the hunt for the first ripe red prizes, and thinking of the avalanche to come if good weather holds out: ripe tomatoes, basil, peppers both sweet and hot, tomatillo salsa...and I thought to myself, the entire line verbatim "it's the most wonderful time of the year." And it's been stuck ever since, random lines about mistletoe and loved ones bounce through my head while I wash arugula in the packshed.
Don't get me wrong, it's also about the most exhausting time of the year, and we are flat-out dead-dog tired, as it pretty common for a small farm in August. Even as the harvests ramp up, there are still a few more rounds of planting and seeding left for our weekly greens, and some transplanting to try to maximize greens into deep fall and winter. When planting overlaps with such beautiful, bountiful, (but also heavy) harvests, farmers can feel a pretty deep exhaustion.
But in many ways we are also settling into our groove as a farm-team, and feeling pretty hopeful about riding this wild wave of late summer into fall. For those of you who have been following our roller coaster of recruiting interns/ labor this year, you'll be happy to know that what finally worked was when Erin recruited her sweetie, Taylor to join us at the end of July after finishing his owl-survey job in the southwest. We've had farmer colleagues advise strongly against hiring couples, but so far this team of two is pretty much rocking, and we couldn't be doing this without them. More than once in the last few weeks, we've let the crew (or "the well oiled machine" as they are also known) handle a huge portion of the harvest day while we worked out the details of our irrigation improvements, or the design details of the daunting market-trailer project.
Taylor lays out the first round of onions for curing in the prop-house. Many more will be coming in soon.
And finally, after many delays, we have finished (the inside of) their living space! The famed intern cabin #1 is livable and lived in. We know any of you have been curious to see it, so today (Tuesday, August 27th), during the latter part of our hosted farmstore time, we have a little cabin-warming/ show-and-tell time scheduled, from 4:00-6:00. To thank Erin and Taylor for allowing folks to poke around their home space, we just ask that you bring a small thank-you gift: a can of food, jar of peanut butter, box of tea, or any sort of non-farm food or drink would be lovely. Or something from the short list of supplies we are still working on outfitting their space with: kitchen towels, a soup ladle, a metal spatula/ flipper, and a cast-iron skillet. The space is pretty sweet, complete with Noah Jackson original light fixtures (of course), and we're hoping it helps keep morale up for hard-working farmhands like these two, for many seasons to come.
The sweet peppers are getting sweeter. Though still mostly green, we are starting to get a few of the colors. September is prime pepper season for us, and it's just around the corner.
A final gratitude, to end: our passenger-vehicle shortage was recently abated through the generosity of some long-time members of the farm family. Folks who have been members since the very first boxes we packed (we used to do a pre-packed CSA box!), gifted the farm a very gently used 1999 Dodge Caravan, and it has already been serving us well as a delivery vehicle!