Week of July 4, Distribution #5

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in your share?

• Red Butterhead lettuce (2 heads)
• Assorted kales  (1 bunch)
• Squashes (4)
• Cucumbers (3)
• Broccoli (1 bunch)
• Japanese turnips (1 bunch)
• Garlic scapes (1 bunch)
• Yellow onions (1 bunch)

Beets and cabbages and Swiss chard should come next week. Your fruit share will consist of sweet cherries from Yonder Farm.

What’s new on the farm

Most of the tomatoes are now as tall as I am. Their names sound a bit contrived, gimmicky, like stage names: Supernova, Plum Perfect, Gin Fizz, Lucky Tiger, Five Star, Enroza, Big Beef, Grandero, Valentine, Cuba Libre. The marketing people are trying to sell a new generation of tomatoes to a new generation of farmers. The workhorses of the group – Abigail, Rebelski, Clementine – sound modest by comparison. The grape tomato called Supernova is getting started. So far there are only handfuls. It is so named because it’s the red orange of fire streaked with yellow, and it’s sweet and tomatoey and explodes in my mouth. It is hard to wait, isn’t it?

Oh, say, can you see? At night it is dark enough here that the lightning bug’s bioluminescence makes a terrific display, a poor man’s fireworks. Late at night in Nate’s elderberry field, from which not one artificial light can be seen, the on and off flashes of thousands of lightning bugs are a spectacle. The aesthetics of farming have appealed to me for as long as I can remember. As a kid in Illinois, it was the imprint of rolling fields of corn and soybeans, interspersed with hog pastures and their farrowing huts. In New Jersey, it was the cut flower farm up the road from my parent’s house, with its colorful rows of zinnias and sunflowers that caught my eye. On the market farms outside of Boston where I attended college it was the neat rows of cabbages and lettuces and carrots and the lovely farm stands. Here at our farm, it’s the uniform rows of potatoes and beets and onions, especially when we’ve managed to keep them free of weeds. It’s staked and trellised peppers, straw mulched beds of winter squashes, the view of a multicolored lettuce field from a height of land, pruned tomatoes in a spiral as they climb a string, cover crops of oats and peas with purple blossoms, and rows of crops on the contour, gentle curves following a sloping landscape.

Happy Fourth of July, Ted