Things are still growing! Despite rain every day for the last two weeks, enough sun is sneaking through that things are still getting bigger. Unfortunately, it’s still not quite fast enough. Emily told me today to call the market manager, and let her know to give our booth space away for the first week to someone on the standby list, as we won’t have enough to fill a stand. I’m a little bummed, but that’s probably for the best. We can make a stronger inaugural showing the following week. The farmers that already have enough marketable produce all have greenhouses and use hoop tunnels. Next year, a greenhouse really needs to happen. Also, we will be more aggressive about the hoop tunnels… we didn’t start with those soon enough this year, it seems.
And it’s not like we don’t have ANYTHING ready… we had a salad from our spinach and arugula last night, and some of our strawberries are already turning. We ate this yummy one a little earlier than “perfection,” just to be sure it went into our faces and not a mouse’s. It was extremely tasty, even with less-than-optimal picking time. I can’t wait for the full crop. 80 strawberry plants sounded like plenty last fall, but now it feels woefully inadequate. I could eat that many by myself!
Here’s a picture of Emily taking a break in the tool shed, which we’ve discovered makes a fantastic place to hide and eat lunch when it’s raining. Ah, the simple pleasures. We’ve been so busy lately that she’s not had time to bake bread and we’ve not even been cooking much. End result: store-bought food. The startling discovery for us, though, was that we’d forgotten how much trash is generated by this kind of eating: plastic bags, food safety sealing rings (there were two on the hummus), plastic containers, plastic lids, plastic bag to carry it in… our normal lunch doesn’t generate any of this. Our time in Guatemala made us think a lot about trash (since we had to burn everything ourselves) and a lot of that spilled over to our modern American existence. We now throw away about two 40-gallon cans of garbage PER YEAR; everything else gets recycled or reduced out of existence.
Check back in about a week, when I give you a rundown of how the first Farmers’ Market went…
