lettuce love

Well, strawberry season is well underway, and this week we opened up the fields for “U-Pick.” It all feels quite festive. For the past few days it’s been all about strawberries and peas—shelling peas and snap peas, both of which are almost as sweet as the berries. I think these things remind people of their childhoods, though it could be just me. They’re tokens of those years when summer wasn’t simply a reprieve from the winter, but brought something more magical with it.

When they first started coming in last week, the berries were perfect, beautiful little specimens—I’m talking stock-photography strawberries. I’ll post my pictures of them here. On the other hand, the ones now arriving from the fields are massive and mutated, like Siamese twins. Sometimes you can see clearly the place where two berries have fused. It’s as if they were trying to eat each other in the fields. Because they’re strawberries, I find this image kind of sweet, not at all cannibalistic. Even strawberries can’t resist each other.

the stock-photo berries

group hug!

Speaking of vegetative love, our “couplets” of lettuce have caught my imagination. These are the heads that are too small to sell on their own, so they get bagged and sold in pairs. One green-leaf head sits comfortably beside one red-leaf head, and the resulting couple goes by several different names, depending on who you talk to, including a “frilly,” a “fuzzy,” a “couplet,” and a “couple.” In any case, it’s a romantic concept. As we were sorting through lettuce heads this morning, Penny pulled out a particularly tiny green one and told me he definitely needed a friend. She’s apt to refer to her vegetables with pleasant personification. She advises me that keeping the displayed veggies fresh and hydrated is all about thinking like a vegetable.

I’m working on getting into a more vegetal state of mind (short, that is, of going into a coma...). Beet greens have replaced spinach in my dreams.