Summer Solstice Report
This week we mark and celebrate the summer solstice — the longest day of the year and the beginning of the summer bounty. After a day of weeding vegetable and flower beds, chicken chores, watering, and planting seeds for fall fields, I (nikki, farmhand) take a walk through the farm with my camera to appreciate some of the subtle signs of what is yet to come.
The chickens have been recently moved to a fresh pasture, quite a few have found their way out of the fence and I catch some and toss them back in as the notorious hawk circles and screams overhead. Charlie is nowhere to be seen, but I hear he has been up late nights protecting them from 4-legged predators, so I do what I can by shouting up at the hawk to leave our chickens alone and see that many of them are taking matters into their own hands (?) and sheltering inside or under their trailer houses.
We have two long beds of peas growing that are loaded with flowers. One of the beds is everyone’s favorite sugar snap peas, and the other, I’m told, will be multi-colored peas. Their flowers are a beautiful pink color, and I love the way the delicate tendrils create a strong support structure for the stems to climb higher and higher. Nearby are beds of bright and frilly salad greens and salanova lettuces, scallions, and spinach.
It’s HOT inside our tomato houses where we are growing multiple varieties of cherry, slicing, and heirloom tomatoes. I’m pretty sure that if I set up a time-lapse camera I could record the plants growing in there—you can almost hear it. It smells amazing, like tomato plants. The vines are boasting the first bunches of fruit and I am dreaming of that first bite into a real tomato.
In another greenhouse, we are growing specialty cucumbers and husk cherries. I’m really happy that Michele chose to grow them in bags of dirt on tables that are waist-high—no weeds! No bending over! She has a mantra that I love and try to repeat to myself when I’m feeling a little exasperated: “work smarter, not harder.”
On to the fields across the street where our signature Zephyr zucchini are emerging from behind bright yellow blossoms, a true harbinger that summer is here. Tiny baby cucumbers appear on every vine for row after row of slicing and pickling cukes. This week we nearly completed planting every row in this field, which is planted with zucchini, kale, chard, bok choy, radishes, cucumbers, bell peppers, hot peppers, frying peppers, cippollini onions (my favorite!), lettuce, escarole, eggplants, broccoli, cabbages, and probably some other things I am forgetting. And then at our fields on Urban Edge Farm we are growing sooooooooooo many potatoes and onions and broccoli and cabbage and more peppers—-and we haven’t even planted the fall squashes yet! I am blown away by the variety and quality of produce that we are growing here. We can feed so many people!
So I hope you enjoy these few glimpses of what’s going on at Zephyr Farm. This is my first season working on the farm, so there is a lot that I don’t know and I appreciate learning so much every day I come here. I have a feeling that a month from now I’ll feel less inclined to take a leisurely walk with my camera after a day of working in the new summer heat. Happy summer to you, and thank you for being a part of what we do.