Summer Updates

Well I've planned a half dozen posts but there's just not time for them all, so let me give you a digest version of how summer is going. We've been gardening, traveling to weddings, celebrating birthdays, and gardening...and gardening. The gardens are glorius this year, and in some ways less maintenance as they mature and shade out weeds. We've put in more beds this year though, mostly vegetable beds, so there's more to keep up with, and much more watering. When we get a good rain I breathe a sigh of relief knowing I'll get a few more free hours the next day or two.

One of the most exciting things is that I've taken on the market garden component of Someday Gardens. We have been selling our lettuce to a local coffee shop, that's featuring them in a special salad. It started off slow, with a delivery every week or so, but the salad took off in popularity, and soon we got a call that they'd take all we could deliver. Suddenly we were delivering two containers (about a pound of lettuce each, washed and dried) a day. Beo went in and asked for the salad for lunch one day after I'd made a delivery that morning, and they told him that our lettuce was already gone! It's nice to have it going over so well, even moreso when you look at the cycle of it. We drink their coffee, compost their coffee grounds and vegetable waste, grow lettuce with the compost, which we sell to them. I've even been watering our new lettuce seedlings with the rinse water from the lettuce. We had to put in an entire new bed just for lettuce because we quickly tired out our early spring batch. It is pretty labor intensive to pick and triple wash, then spin and dry that much lettuce, but I am thrilled to be able to do it. The other day I came out from making a delivery, saw our "Be the change you wish to see in the world" bumpersticker, and smiled to think how we were implementing local organic foods in our own community.

The flower gardens and the prairie have taken off as well. We're thrilled that a little thirteen-lined ground squirrel has made our yard his home. We've also had a frequent hummingbird visitor who is new to us this year. There are pollinators galore buzzing all over the place, and we had a huge influx of butterflies late last month. There were dozens all over our front yard, and at first I thought they were just everywhere, but looking up and down the street I realized that they were all concentrated in our yard. If I were a butterfly I guess I'd hang out here too. Heck, I'm not a butterfly and here I am.

Eating local has been somewhat of a breeze. We've made a couple of trips to the Farmer's Market, but many of our meals came from our own backyard until late last month, when things got so busy we were always on the run and our lettuce was all going elsewhere. We did enjoy a harvest of peas though, and an early harvest of beets. Beets are one of those vegetable creatures that I never learned to love until I'd had them fresh. Now they're one of my favorites. This meal was oh-so-local: backyard peas, lightly steamed; backyard beets, roasted, homemade bread spread with locally produced goat cheese; backyard lettuce with local feta and a homemade vinaigrette. Divine. I so love eating locally. It gives one something to look forward to. I will do my best to keep up more with my blog. It's frustrating that the time of year I have so much to write about, I have so little time to do so. I hope everyone's enjoying a fabulous summer.