Green Summer

Your industrious blog host, sweaty, dirty and weary after a day on the farm.  Our last two days have really brought us into summer.  Today we hit the low 90's, and it felt hot.  But you can almost see the eggplant growing; they've been so patient, just waiting for some days like these.

Another portrait, this time with awesome farm hat.  It's certainly not the most fashionable, but this thing is lightweight, comfortable, relatively cool, keeps the sun out of my eyes and off of my neck.  It's crucial.

Some healthy bulbs of fennel.  

Ahhh, tomatoes.  If we can just hold off the blight a bit longer, we'll get some of these in.  Actually, late blight has come to our farm.  My boss found some on our potatoes over the weekend, and mowed all the plants down.  The potatoes, however, are still in there, and had reached harvestable size.  We'll let them sit in the soil for a couple of weeks to set the skin and hopefully let all the blight on the plant tissue above ground die, and then harvest and store them.

A beautiful little zephyr summer squash; the flower is still larger than the fruit.  I love these things.

A tiny watermelon, just starting out, still smaller than a golf ball.

We have started to see a lot of the asian eggplants get going.

A nice looking pepper.

These are the pick-your-own flower beds, a big hit with our shareholders, especially young children.  I don't really know much about the different flowers, and certainly wouldn't put them high on my personal list of priorities, but they sure are pretty, and even I will admit a room seems a bit brighter when there are some fresh flowers about.  We have a few with edible blossoms, such as borage (very bland), bee balm (sweet and spicy) and nasturtium (my favorite, peppery).

A sunflower.

An unopened sunflower.

Green beans in the jungle.

One of my favorite views of the farm, these are some of our tomato beds, staked and trellised, clover planted between the beds as a pathway and mulch.  Most of these are heirloom varieties and some cherry types.  Still keeping our fingers crossed.  We heard today that a sister farm down south just west of Boston is most likely going to lose all their tomatoes, largely due to the blight.

The crew zonked out after lunch.