last day...

Well, my summer break is drawing to a close, and although the season won't reach its peak until September, things look unbelievably different from how they did when I first started here. The tables that once held seedlings are now heavy with vegetables, and the ones that were empty in June are heaped in perfect abundance. The employees who were pale and sweatshirted back then now walk around in shorts, their bare arms in varying shades of T-shirt tan and sunburn, and they are joined by more staff. Even my bike ride looks different: the gardens have matured; the dead possum that appeared beside the road on my second day has decomposed completely, and been replaced by other roadkill.

Friday was my last day at the farm stand, and Monica's as well. Carol Anne (of the whoopie pie fame - she's an awesome baker and used to supply the farm stand with fresh whoopie pies) baked us caramel brownies, which we all munched on throughout the morning. In a few days I leave to study abroad in France. In addition to packing, I've spent the past few days catching up with my family - hiking and packing before I have to leave them for a year.

The summer has been an incredible learning experience. I have a much better understanding of how local food is produced, for one thing. I've learned a lot about the way I work, too - like how the quiet of work in the fields really agrees with me. It always put me in a good mood. And the people at Jordan's are all so fun, interesting, and kind. Besides Susan, Rachel, Emily, and the field guys (we just referred to them as "the guys," since for most of this summer Jim was the only other non-female around the stand), the staff turns over quite a bit from year to year. But the core of the farm is definitely the Jordan siblings. They truly amaze all of us with how hard they work and how dedicated they are to the farm. 

I'll close with some more of Sydney's beautiful photos, so you can reminisce about the summer so far, and look forward to all the gorgeous veggies to come...

Charlotte pipe - clearly meant to be!

how stuff works

I've decided that, now that my summer at the farm is nearing its close, I should give you a clearer breakdown of how it all actually works. It took me a while to get the big picture of the operation, but things fall into place neatly. Vegetables arrive from the field in pickup-truck-loads of bins, buckets, and crates, which sit patiently at one end of the back deck until the processors wash them, trim them, and neatly pack them into bins or trays in the cooler. The two big walk-in coolers out back are named after the Jordan siblings' parents, who bought the farm in the 1940s: Billy and Ruthie. "The blueberries are in Billy," we tell each other - and to us doesn't sound like a particularly hungry man just ate all our berries.

Lettuce and Swiss chard, pre-processing

We farm standers, then, with the exception of Jim and Susan, who run the cash register, divide our time between stocking, processing and packing, weeding, and doing other random jobs. We all get our moments of glory. Sydney washed and bagged potatoes for days on end until we started calling her the Potato Queen; after several hours of sorting cherry tomatoes Tyler became the Tomato Man. I spent one morning doing the very odd job of snipping onions - they'd gone soggy in the fields after a hard rain, and I was in charge of snipping off their stems and laying them in the sun to dry. Sydney said this made me the Onion Doctor.

Invoices lined up in a jaunty row (photo cred it Sydney)

 A lot of our vegetables actually go out to places like The Well and IGA, or nonprofits like Project Feed, Judy's Produce Pantry, Good Shepherd, and the Root Cellar, so we also spend some time packing up wholesale produce. Throughout the week, we also work on stocking the Veggie Bus, a cheerily-painted mobile farm stand run by the cheery Scott and Mia. The bus sets up in senior housing areas like 7100 Broadway, as well as at Idexx, and makes fresh produce accessible to people who may not be able to come out to the farm stand.

And then, of course, there's the day-to-day (minute-to-minute, on a busy day - sometimes it can feel like every sixty seconds holds its own to-do list) running of the stand itself. Stocking, icing, opening, closing.

Laying out the vegetables before opening

The ice table, half-full. I think the greens and purples make a beautiful and serendipitous photo.

What we call the "hot tub" is actually full of ice.

faces at the farm

The other day, Sydney, an aspiring photographer, brought her camera in to work and snapped some awesome photos of life at the farm. Since my own photos haven't included many faces so far, I'm posting some of Sydney's here. Behold some of the faces of Jordan's Farm:

Jamie and Emily being adorable

We've decided Jamie is very photogenic. You should see the photo of her using beet greens as bunny ears - but I won't post that on the internet...

Emily, in a hurry to get through those doors and be productive!

Jim being a hippie... The wooden doors were handmade by Emily's dad several years ago

In all honesty, we have a pretty good time at the farm. For all of us farm stand people, it seems, music can be a deciding factor in making the day a good one. Mid-season, somebody hooked up a boom-box above the sinks out back, where much of our vegetable-processing gets done. "I don't know what we did before we had this thing," Emily said appreciatively a few days ago, looking at the boom-box with all the affection you'd save for a beloved dog.

How else could we listen to the Spice Girls while we work? To Jim's reggae jams? To Jamie and Emily's favorite Disney numbers? Well actually, there's one other way: Emily's "jammy pack." Yeah, it's real - a portable radio zipped into a fanny pack, so that we can bring all Em's favorite music with us into the fields. Way back in June, long before the jammy pack made its first appearance, Jamie declared to me that fanny packs were definitely "coming back." "It hasn't happened yet, but it's going to," she assured me. "I'm just waiting for the right one to invest in."

Clearly, these two were destined to be friends.

Working in the fields with Emily, Jamie, Rachel, and the jammy pack is so different from weeding with one other person in fields that are vast and quiet. The music and chatter make the environment fun, lively, vibrant. But I can appreciate a balance between the two. Today I was deadheading alone in the flower garden - in a cold, driving rain - and although this gave me a nice couple of hours to think, I did find myself longing for that jammy pack...

As for vegetable news: Jordan's own corn is finally in! We've been stocking plenty from Gillespie's and Maxwell's, but everybody has been asking for Bib's own. We also have a second round of both spinach, from Flying Pond Farm in Vienna, Maine, and of strawberries, from Maxwell's. And try salanova - the lesser-known cousin to baby lettuce mix. It comes from miniature heads of lettuce that are sweet and crunchy and hold salad dressing perfectly. I feel the urge to put in this plug for salanova not only because people are always pulling it out from the cooler and asking what it is, but also because I had some with dinner and it's delicious!

beet makeover

I thought I'd post a few pictures of weeding, just to convey how satisfying it can feel. The other day I was working on golden beets with Monica.

The golden beets before any weeding...

...and after!

A work in progress. We clean up pretty good, right?

colorful things at the farm stand

This past week has gotten me out into the flower garden a few times - first to weed and then to cut flowers. People are welcome to pick their own flowers by the bunch, but every morning Penny assembles a few beautiful bouquets to sell pre-cut in the stand. On Friday they were selling particularly fast (I wonder if there were a lot of birthdays that day, or if the sun just inspired everyone to get flowery?), and Penny sent me out to replenish our supply. I'm not an artist and don't really have an eye for color and that sort of thing, but trust me - it's hard to make those flowers look ugly. Here are some of my bouquets:

Don't they look pretty, mixed in with the fresh basil and parsley?

It was quite pleasant working in the flower garden, especially when a sun-shower passed over, briefly breaking the heat. I've heard these types of showers called "pineapple rain," and although I have no idea where the expression comes from, I like it. Sun-showers are yellow, watery, and sweet, so I guess the metaphor fits well.

In other photographic news, peppers are in, and they too are very photogenic. On Saturday I brought some of my mom's delicious gazpacho for lunch - at the recommendation of a customer, she added banana peppers (and extra cucumbers to temper the heat). It was definitely the best I've ever had!

Aren't peppers just the coolest?

dusting day

Today's chilly rain left us without a lot to do - no weeding, and few customers. But it gave us time to clean more deeply than usual - to sweep up, hose down, and wipe off. Rainy days are when the dust is lifted, when things are picked up and swept under, when long-forgotten dropped things are finally coaxed out from deep under our work bench and returned to their proper places. Every wine bottle and jam jar is carefully dusted; the mat out back is hosed clean. Just in time for the mud that rainy days also bring - but still, we get a chance to do a deeper clean than we'd have time for on a sunny day. We put on some of Jim's reggae music and made the most of it.

As the summer progresses and I see more sides to the farm's operation, I'm starting to get the big picture of how things work, and I feel better equipped to answer customers' questions. Right down to the geography of the farm: weeding has taken me to the lettuce, salad mix, cabbage, kale, cucumber, and pea fields. During strawberry season, I could only gesture vaguely toward the U-Pick field, never having been over there myself. Now, if anyone were to be interested in picking their own cabbage, I would know just where to direct them... But the geography lessons have given me some useful information as well. Having seen the vegetables, I know how far along they are and when they will likely be picked. And now I know what Rachel is talking about when she describes a place as, "You know, just past the beet greens."

Shelling pea season is, sadly, over, but tomorrow, unless the rain throws a wrench in Penny's plans, expect peppers!

going hoeing

Monday was another weeding expedition with Sydney, this time hoeing in the cabbage and kale field. It's very peaceful out in the fields. They look out onto a wide yellow marsh in one direction, the picturesque Spurwink church in another. And the neat little rows have their own picturesque beauty to them. I like weeding because it is quiet and methodical. Although the fields can look endless and the cabbage and kale rows will take four days or more to finish weeding (depending on whether it's Sydney and me, or the more practiced and graceful Pee Wee, Orlando, Neftali and Miguel), when you actually get down to doing it it seems attainable.

As I write this, at home, it's dark and hot outside. Lightning shoots across the sky occasionally, menacingly, but as of yet there's no thunder and only a light drizzle of rain. There's supposed to be a real thunderstorm tonight, which I'll admit I could sort of go for right now. I just hope it's dry by the time I bike to work tomorrow...