corn city

The new buzzwords around the farm this week? Green beans, blueberries, and corn! But especially corn. The very first of the season came in on Friday, from Gillespie Farms in New Gloucester, and it's already completely sold out. 

I learned today that, judging by a blemished, unsaleable ear of corn I bit into, corn is just as good raw as it is cooked. Even this very early corn is sweet and juicy. My favorite vegetables are always the ones that taste like candy: carrots, peas, sungold tomatoes. With the two ears of corn I managed to snag, my mom and I made a lovely corn and tomato chowder with greenhouse tomatoes grown in Madison, Maine. Eat your heart out for now, but by the end of the week we should have more corn, courtesy of Maxwell's, and in about two and a half weeks Jordan's own corn will hit the stand.

leaving twenty percent

Monday was my first foray into the fields - weeding! Sydney and I spent all day in the lettuce field, with Monica joining us for the morning. Weeding is hard work, of course, and I'm still sore today, but it was a welcome change of pace and scenery. Work in the farm stand is on a whole different order of magnitude from the fields. When afternoon rolls around in the stand, you make a mental list of the dozens of small tasks that need doing before you should let yourself take a sandwich break. In the fields, you wonder if you will get halfway through your task before lunch.

Settling on a "system" for hitting every row is like solving a complex logic puzzle: there is always a more efficient way you haven't thought of yet. We tried you-start-at-that-end-I'll-start-at-this-end, and you-take-that-row-I'll-take-this-row, and you-hoe-I'll-hand... But the best system we found was a sort of leap frog method: Sydney started several feet ahead of me, and when I got to where she started I'd walk down the row to several feet ahead of her. And so on. This was a great method not because of its efficiency, but because the occasional walking down the field felt like progress. 

Despite the heat, the sweat, and the lots and lots of dirt, it was actually a great day. It feels good to clean the rows and liberate the lettuce. I always find it satisfying to pull out a weed, but especially from lettuce. The rows of small heads can look so nice and neat when they are weeded. Weeding brings out the perfectionist in me, which makes it hard to follow Penny's advice of 80%. This is a rule of thumb she taught me on my very first day here: in farming, she says, you aim for 80%. You pull 80% of the weeds. If you spent your time clawing at the last 20% of the weeds, the small ones and the stubborn ones, you'd never get anything done - and on top of that you'd go insane.

This is a Life Lesson of the Week that is probably, actually, a good life lesson to try and learn. Weeding, it turns out, is a great exercise in the art of Leaving Twenty Percent. 

beauty is pain

Today was one of those beautiful summer days that are so flattering to the world. My bike ride home from work was stunning in the warm evening light. Here are a few photos of it... I feel so lucky to live a bike ride away from so much beauty.

An evening garden

This isn't Jordan's Farm, but Maxwell's - which provides some of our tasty strawberries, arugula, and basil

Maxwell's

...and some casual llamas on my route home. If these are your llamas - they brighten my day every morning and evening!

While days like this make our town look nicer than ever, it does NOT have the same effect on vegetables. In the heat, lettuce wilts; beet greens whine and Swiss chard languishes pathetically. It takes a surprising amount of running around - spritzing veggies with cold water, returning them to the cooler when they need to crisp, replacing the ones customers buy, keeping the display tables well-iced - to keep the farm stand looking exactly the same.

The vegetables do look darn good when they are properly cosmeticked. Colorful, piled in luxurious heaps, sparkly with little drops of cold water. Like pebbles on the beach, most vegetables look best when they are glossy with water. Our eyes know that pebbles belong in the sea, and when we take them home we can never quite replicate their natural, oceanic loveliness. The funny thing is that vegetables are naturally dirty. Smeared with mud or caked with sand. For some reason our eyes want to think that vegetables, too, are sea-things, that wetness is their most natural state.

bye bye berries

Unfortunately, the rain I wrote about wiped out a lot of our already-ripened strawberries. The ones that were still green when the rains hit have mostly been picked, sold, and eaten as the season winds down for the year, although Penny says we'll probably be harvesting them in smaller amounts until the end of the weekend. For the past few days I've been singing a chorus of "No-I'm-sorry-we're-out-for-the-day-maybe-tomorrow-we-really-can't-guarantee" to a parade of disappointed customers.

It's reinforced that fact for me: in farming, you just can't guarantee. At the bakery where I used to work, nothing couldn't be done - if it wasn't in the display case, chances were we could bake or frost or fill it out back. But at the farm stand, it's up to mother nature. Customer service is not exactly what nature's about, and unfortunately a lot of people have to go home berryless. On the bright side, blueberry season isn't too far off...

In other news, I've finally figured out how to get my photos onto the computer! I plan on going back and adding them to my previous posts. Penny says she doesn't know how I function without a smart phone - I like my old-fashioned technology, my dumb phone and digital camera, but even they can be tricky to figure out...

beet greens ready to be washed

these were the early days, when there were only a few veggies to put out

the flowers are starting to look colorful

they become lovely little bouquets like this one by the register

rainy day

Today was one of those hot, electric summer days, heavy with thunderstorm. The storm finally came around midafternoon. Since people tend to buy veggies while the sun is shining, the brief storm brought with it a little reprieve from an otherwise hectic day. It was nice to breathe for a moment, the farm stand quiet except for the percussive downpour on the roof.

Sydney confessed that she loves days like this. Poor Rachel, meanwhile, was out weeding when the rain hit, but she didn't let it stop her from finishing the job. Jamie got even messier today: after a morning spent planting flowers, she came back with dirt caked to every extremity including her nose. She seemed completely delighted.

Luckily, the rain had stopped and the hot sun had returned by the time I had to bike home at four. On my way, I got a photo of the farm from Wells Road, and if it comes out the way it seemed it will from the tiny preview on my digital camera, it shows the farm stand, the fields, and the tiny restaurant next door as if they are veiled in white mist. It wasn't really misty out, and I thought it was just my camera acting characteristically defunct. But on further inspection I found condensation on the lens, from the day's heat - at least, I think that's what it was. I can't help but find this really cool, somehow, this fake mist, this ghostly fog that exists only in the picture.

you don't have to think that the phantom fog is as cool as I do - but you can't deny that the farm is gorgeous

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.

strawberries!

The strawberries have arrived! We now have the first of this year’s crop, from Maxwell's Farm in Cape Elizabeth. The farm stand is thick with their heavy sweet scent. Though for a week customers had been asking why we didn’t have strawberries yet, everyone who came in yesterday seemed pleasantly surprised: “Strawberries? Already?” As if the berries had only been a dream that no one expected to come true.

As of yesterday, ours had not yet ripened, due – as Susan and Penny explained – to a difference in microclimates between the two regions of our town. Jordan’s end of Cape is just enough colder that our strawberries need a few more days.

Now that it’s finally hot out, we at the farm stand have been watering flowers and icing vegetables like crazy. At my old job I used to ice cupcakes – now, I ice turnips and radishes and beet greens. Beet greens wilt fast, but it’s easy to forget to replenish their steadily melting bed of ice. Which reminds me that I am still, solidly, the rookie around here. The newest face here – Emily, who started this week – is a recent college graduate who’s been working summers at Jordan’s since she was about ten years old…

fresh from the fields!