Your BasketSuddenly Summer
May started warm and ended downright hot, with an eight-day run of clear-blue skies and baking heat. In-between, there was plenty of rain, but no freezing temperatures. For the first time in three years, no middle-of-May freeze to destroy the fruit crop! As a happy result, every fruit-bearing plant is fairly bursting with the release of stored potential. Blueberries, cherries, grapes, persimmons, and apples. Oh my! I can't look at them without breaking into gleeful giggles.
As coltsfoot gave way to a remarkable crop of dandelions, which is even now yielding to red clover and the first fuzzy rosettes of mullein, seeds planted in April began sprouting in the Brightside vegetable garden. By May 8, snowpeas, radishes and mesclun greens had pushed their way into the intermittent sunshine. Twenty days later, we were savoring the incomparable pleasure of fresh lettuces, arugula, radicchio, endive, mache, and frisee. When you live a two-hour drive from a grocery store, fresh greens are a highly anticipated treat. Bath County Farmers Market-goers apparently feel the same way. At yesterday's opening market, we quickly sold out of seven boxes.
Carrots, beets, turnips, spinach, chard and (my gift to myself) eight kinds of sunflowers planted early in the month are now well on their way.
In the spirit of making hay while the sun shines, I have spent nearly every moment of the past week planting the rest of the garden. Potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkin, melon, winter squash, summer squash, gourds, cucumbers, peppers, beans, cabbage, broccoli and more. While schlepping water to thirsty transplants, new-parent tree swallows and bluebirds kept a wary eye on me from their nest boxes. The air was mostly still, and the temperature astonishingly hot.
Make no mistake, this work is hard. The Brightside garden is located on a not-insubstantial slope, and so, by the end of a long day I often feel as though I've spent it on a Stairmaster. Too tired to think, much less write a blog or even an email. But also, at the same time, so very full of gratitude. I am doing what I love to do.
In all the busy-ness of harvesting Spring herbs and preparing for opening-day markets and planting the garden and addressing an epic invasion of tent caterpillars (yikes!) it is sometimes easy to forget to stop, just stop, and look around.
As Matthew Broderick says in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once and awhile, you could miss it."
That's one thing I don't want to do.