Something smells so good...

Pete is cooking dinner for us tonight. Actually, he cooks pretty frequently. He's good that way. One of the main reasons we started this farm was to eat well. It's hard to do sometimes since we're so busy. When we go grocery shopping, we get some strange looks from folks at the register for only buying pounds and pounds of dry beans, pasta, rice, and a good 10 pounds of peanut butter at a time. We eat a lot of PB&J's, but have been trying to eat our produce as much as possible, since it's so delicious.

We have a few tomatoes. Heirlooms. Ripe, actually overripe.

We have garlic that we're pulling up every week to check to see if it's 'ripe'. I didn't think we'd have garlic, since we didn't get our land really until March. But spring was early, and we planted the first week of March, and even though our garlic is behind other people's, and a bit smaller, it's still the real thing, and delicious with our salsa, our masa tortillas, our garlic butter, and left over salad greens. They're so green, it's almost neon. Growing up in Alaska, I didn't know what real vegetables looked like until moving 'down south'. (to washington state).

I'm secretly glad to see so many of those tomatoes splitting open from overwatering. (I think that's what we did). We need to eat our produce, too. Unfortunately, many farmers in this country don't eat well. Granted, a lot of those farmers do it conventionally, and are monocropping, because the world of agriculture has changed so much in the last century, and no longer do farmers also grow their own food. This is a strange posting our our blog, but I think it's important to think about. How many farmers grow their own food in this country? We have to make it a point to eat as much of our own produce as we can, because we have a hard time finding the time to cook. But at least we're growing all of the things we would want to eat, and we're still growing some things just for our own consumption (dry beans). All of the flowers I'm growing are not for 'consumption' but unfortunately don't make it to market much for lack of time, but I am sooooooo glad I planted all of those flowers, because they make the farm just so much more beautiful. Really. And they smell good. Kinda like that dinner that Pete's finishing up.

Oh, one more thing. We got accepted into two winter markets: Bath and Gardiner we'll also be at this winter. Starting in November, we'll move inside. See you!

Farmers' market

We've been doing markets now for almost two months, and finally getting into the swing of it. We love putting together our stand to show off the vegetables and hopefully not overwhelm any customers. The photos (thanks to Jayne) below are in Gardiner at our Wednesday market. It usually is in the park, but it had rained earlier in the day, and we set up in the street. I had initially thought that people in the houses might not like the market right in front of their homes, but at least one person was thrilled to have such easy access to all of us vendors. We're gearing up now for tomato season, as well as eggplants and peppers. Our tomato CSA begins in a few weeks, and we're excited for that, as well as more organizing for our winter CSA. It's the 2nd half of July, and we're still soaking up the sun of summer.