Photojournal: Nature’s first green is gold

Early mornings are becoming more golden as the summer wears off.  This is a short photo journal of a Saturday morning of harvest for the farm stand.

I arrive before everyone else, unlock the sheds, roll the carts out of the farm stand, set some tables up and get a few more things set out to get the transformation underway.  

Farm stand “BEFORE”

As a few youth farmers arrive, I’m washing out totes for lettuce harvest and filling the wash tubs with cool water to be ready for when the full cart returns.  We check in briefly before the team heads out to harvest strawberries and the farm stand managers go after lettuce.

Washing totes at sunrise

Filling the wash tubs

I fill up some buckets of water and grab the pruners for flowers, make sure I have twist ties and totes for chard and eggplant, and head out to harvest.  We started harvesting a new bed of Swiss chard last week, so it’s luscious, huge, vibrant, and thick-stemmed.  It’s not hard to find twenty bunches, and I’m reminded of all the kale bunching in this area earlier this year.

Swiss chard reminding me of the human body

Next I’m into the sunflowers– another new patch that came on a week or two ago.  It’s behind the greenhouses in between corn plantings, so I’m surrounded by tall, glowing leaves and flower stalks.  I notice the moon still hanging in western sky beyond the dark red sunflowers, the sunshine dancing over the corn flowers, and I fill my buckets.

Waning moon over sunflowers

Early morning corn flowers

Sunrise in the sunflowers

Two full buckets of sunflowers

Sunlight catches the petals

I continue on to the mixed flower bed at the end of Field Two.  It’s getting old, but there are still new flushes of statice, zinnias, strawflower, snapdragon, and scabiosa.  I spend a while gathering two more buckets of these smaller stems, feeling the warmth of full sun on my shoulders.  I’m just within ear shot of the farm stand, and I hear totes banging and voices floating through the orchard.

Mixed flowers ready for market

One more stop in the greenhouses to snip a small tote of giant eggplants, and I head to the tubs to quickly dunk the chard.  They come out glistening.  I roll my colorful cart toward the hubbub of produce and conversations at the stand, set out the chard, and get to work creating bouquets from all these flowers.

Swiss chard display

Bouquet display

The stand is nearly ready for customers, and I step back.  As the golden dawn subsides to day, all our hard work is laid out plain for everyone to admire, take home, and pass over their tastebuds.  Nothing wrong with the bright light of mid morning, but that sunrise sure does hit the heartstrings a little differently.  

Farm stand “AFTER”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 

-Robert Frost

Corn season

It’s finally fresh corn season on the farm.  In just the week I was gone, our first planting came and (almost) went.  Our next one is fully pumping now, and we have four more waiting after that.  Imagine: the youth farmers were planting baby seedlings for our last round, just down the field from where others were harvesting from the first round last week.  Field two, behind the greenhouses, is a microcosm of the summer season, with three successional rounds planted side by side, baby to kid to teenager corn stalks, all still waiting to tassel and reproduce.  The crazy part of it all, I realized yesterday, is that each planting’s maturity brings us one week closer to the end of the crew’s season.  By the time they say goodbye at the end of September, we’ll be closing in on those last plantings that today seem so far off from ever producing ears.

Second round of Sweet Rhythm sweet corn ready for harvest

Gorgeous ears

Maybe I’m putting too much weight on that corn.  My mind flipped a bit during stretching circle this morning when Madison, rubbing her eyes as she chose a stretch to share, commented that she took it easy last weekend, tried to rest a lot, and with a whine, “just trying to get more sleep before school starts.” 

“Less than a month!” someone else threw into the circle.  August is their last hoorah not only for free time, but for spending more than just a weekend morning on the farm.  And our last chance to get the space fully in shape, weeded, planted, and ready to tackle the abundant harvests of autumn with a skeleton crew and volunteer groups.

And while we’re pushing forward to finish plantings and tame weeds on the farm, people on the crew are going through their own lot of challenges in life.  Being forced to move from their homes, dealing with domestic abuse, supporting themselves and living on their own for the first time, recovering from assault, warding off infections and illnesses, figuring out alternative modes of transportation, and the constant navigating of relationships that seems to fall most heavily on teenagers.  Whenever I listen to someone’s story, I’m reminded that the farm is just a small piece of their complex life– that even the most dedicated of them will eventually let it all go and shift focus to school and friends and other jobs come wintertime.

But for now, the crew is in their late season groove, we still have weeks to share with one another, and that mighty corn is bumpin’.  Chomp.  Chomp.  Chomp.

Fresh raw corn is THE BEST!