Late July Update

As expected, time is very tight now, as we keep squeezing a little bit more into each day.  Some other stuff gets squeezed out (like rest and sitting down at the table for breakfast or lunch) but somehow we are still riding this wave.  I think of the tomatoes as a managed avalanche.  The plants are loaded with ready to pick fruit, and we have divided up the patch into sections so we are never trying to pick the whole thing at once -- but this means that we are never finished.  It seems fine to have some percentage of the avalanche hanging on the plants. 

Benjamin came home a few days ago, stopping here to pick up his motorcycle so he can go to his annual dance festival. He is on the crew of volunteers that sets up the event for a week and then he dances for a few days and then he will start his New England tour, visiting friends and family.  While he was home, he was in some weird time zone, sleeping from midnight to 5 AM and then from 4 to 7 in the evening.  He looks exactly the same. I am always surprised that he looks like the Benjamin who left here so long ago.  So much has happened in his life, you would think it would show. 

Alissa landed happily in Guatemala three weeks ago to be immersed in Spanish (alissaroundtheworld.blogspot.com) and has learned so much that she has forgotten all her French.  She is living every moment fully.

Niece Tillie has been here for about a week and announced this time that she wanted to do grown-up work.  Up until this year she has always been on the CSA and stand team, but this season she is throwing herself fully into all work. Cheerful and competent and full of sparkle and personality.  She is part of a gaggle of teenagers here at Blueberry Hill.  They go out for ice cream, they talk late into the night, they watch movies, it's like summer camp.

There is only one boy in the crowd, Peio. He fits into whatever demographic surrounds him.  He eats dinner alone with me and Jon, completely comfortably. He works with anyone at all during the day, doing anything that is asked of him and keeps up his end of the conversation.  Surrounded by many women, from age 17 to 80, he is totally at home.  He is such a happy guy, and so interested in every single thing. 

This has been a summer with not much breathing time for me, but all the wheels are still turning and every person is doing her best to make things go well.  I can't imagine how we would survive without these willing, hard-working, upbeat and sharp young people.  The hiring process was a success, hallelujah.  And thank goodness Carrie is having a healthy and easy pregnancy. She is 32 weeks pregnant and working very long days. 

When this baby comes, that will be the last gigantic juggling pin. Not a beach ball, not a bowling ball, something of a different shape entirely.  The new baby will distract all of us (because we love babies) and Carrie will have another job, round the clock. 

Today was the first Saturday in five weeks when it did not rain.  Recently we had several days of such intense humidity that we were moving around in air that was mostly water.  On those days, by 6 AM my first T-shirt was soaked all the way through.  But then a lovely new weather pattern arrived and one T-shirt lasted all day long, with only a tinge of dampness. On those days of thick hazy humidity, I don't check the weather reports. I just get through the day without any expectations for improvement.  The beautiful days are a gift.

Jon has added another job to his broad range of summer tasks.  In addition to fixing things as they break, buying things for his myriad projects, counting the money and making the bank deposits, clearing the counter when I can't stand the chaos anymore, maintaining all the vehicles, and sometimes doing some computer work, he is now going to market on Sundays while we wait for Benjamin to come home from his travels. Benjamin will lighten our loads for a few months.

We have not quite reached the midpoint of the season, but it is within view.  There are several ways to know when we have reached the midpoint -- one is when we plant the last beans, another is when we get the fall plantings in the ground.  Those fall plantings are looming over us now.  The plants are all ready to go, we just have to get ourselves organized to find the time to get them in the ground.  It is daunting.  But by this time next week, in all likelihood, the kale and cauliflower and collards will be marching like soldiers across the field, looking ahead to fall.

I have moments when I realize how much I love all of this.  In any case, I have no moments when I am uninterested.  At its very simplest, all we do here is try to move vegetables off the farm and collect up dollar bills.  But it is so un-simple -- there are too many variables to count -- that there is no potential for boredom.

And that is the state of things on July 25.  As always, I am thankful that we are all healthy.  It's a miracle, really.

26 Hours Off The Ranch

The other day, for the first time in forever, I thought to myself, "I don't want to go to work today."  This just about never happens.  But it had been too long since I had cleared my desk, sat indoors, gone for two hours in a row without breaking a sweat in the daytime.  So I showed up at the Mellow Monday meeting and announced that I didn't want to work.  Everyone said I could go, so I went back home to putter around.  By the end of the day, I had done something nice for a few other people,  I had gone to a piano lesson (without practicing once since the last one, oy) and rearranged the furniture in the living room with Jon -- so we could move this gigantic cedar chest (that someone gave us a while ago) from the middle of the room into the corner. I felt better.

But this is a sign that it is time to take a real break.  I can go for months without really noticing, and then suddenly I am out of gas.  So we found a gap in the week -- one where everyone else is working hard but where my presence is not truly necessary -- and we escaped on Friday afternoon. 

We had no plan at all. We threw some clothes into a bag and got in the car. Jon checked his phone to see what was going on with the traffic.  Red red all around the Beltway, all the way south, all the way north.  It was Friday afternoon, after all.  So we went west.  I said I didn't want to spend our whole time in the car, so that meant we had to stop after I had finished my first nap.  We stopped in Front Royal. First indulgence: frozen custard. Second: a used book store.  Third: a room at a run-down but perfectly fine motel with a swimming pool.  We got into the pool and floated around, happy as clams. Next: dinner at a very cool restaurant that specialized in local foods, cooked slowly, served with attention and warmth.  Then to a movie.  We go to a movie about once a year, so it is hard for any movie to be good enough for that. This one was good, and probably better than we realized, in comparison to all the bad movies we have missed.

The next morning I started getting text messages from workers at 5 AM, but I went back to sleep in between them, and we didn't really get moving until about 8:00.  Went to the farmers market downtown and chatted with the vegetable grower.  This was one small market.  May have been more crafts than produce for sale.  We bought some plums that will be ripe next week and moved on.  Bought a lovely picnic lunch at the same place as last night and headed up into the Shenandoah National Park.  Temperature was perfect, somewhere in the 70s, cloudy with some sun sometimes.  We looked at the map, identified an easy hike, and set off on the trail to find the waterfall.  After about a mile or so, Jon said this was not the hike we thought it was, and we were never going to find the waterfall. I hate backtracking, especially uphill on a muddy trail, so we went back to the road and walked the mile or so to the car. Oh well.  The trail to the waterfall was really the fire road.  We decided to skip the waterfall, as there were lots of families with dogs going down the nice wide gravel path that we somehow overlooked (okay, I overlooked it. Jon thought it was the right one and I said it wasn't...).

Lunch at an overlook, sitting high in the clouds, peeking through at Massanutten Mountain.  It was just lovely.

Because I hate backtracking, we decided to come home through Thornton Gap and Sperryville, and that meant we were going to be driving right past The Farm at Sunnyside and we should stop to visit.  There was zero cell phone service from Skyline Drive all the way down the mountain and into Rappahannock County, so we could not give any warning of our arrival.  We just arrived, and were greeted warmly.  We watched them pick squash and cucumbers but did not offer to help. No one minded that we just stood on the edge of the field and chatted while they did what I do many days a week.

Came home to find that everything had gone perfectly in our absence.  The only thing, of course, is that when I leave, Carrie has to work all day long on a day that she would ordinarily be taking a break. And that is a luxury that can only be afforded rarely -- when I run out of gas. 

But now I am feeling ready to get back to work, having eaten ice cream, floated in a perfectly clear swimming pool, hiked on a beautiful day, visited a small business that deserves to thrive (that sells deluxe picnic lunches), and had a full day of chatting with my husband.  What could be better?

Third Annual Blueberry Pickernic

It used to be, long ago, that we spent the Fourth of July making hay.  This is over thirty years ago, back when we used to make our own mulch. Dad and Lani baled thousands of bales every spring, starting in early May and ending in early July.  Most of the bales came from fields that were within four miles of the home farm, but on the Fourth of July we came out to Loudoun (I say "came" because that is where I am this morning) for a marathon day of raking and baling and loading.  In the week before, one of us would have been out here mowing these vast and bumpy and hilly fields, avoiding the groundhog holes.  The first pass around the outside perimeter of the field took about 45 minutes, and only after three or four circles did the time of each circuit start to go down.  I have no idea how many acres we would cut, but the hills made it impossible to see from one end of the field to the other.

The biggest group we could muster on a holiday, maybe ten or twelve of us, came out in trucks with trailers in the hottest part of the day.  The person driving the tractor with the baler, usually Dad, was off on the horizon, following my wiggly windrows.  All of this can only happen when it is dry and hot. The air doesn't have to be dry (and never is) but the grass must be dry or the bales weigh twice as much and will get moldy if stored.  When we arrived at the field, the outside four or five rows of bales were ready, and we began to make our way  around, picking up the bales and loading them on the dump truck and trailer.  One driver, one or two on the truck and trailer to stack, and the rest of the crew walking from bale to bale, picking them up and carrying them to the vehicles. The first few layers were easy, but as the stacks grew, the people on the ground had to throw them higher and higher to the stackers who teetered above.

The day I remember most clearly, we picked up and loaded over a thousand bales.  The dump truck could hold about 150 bales, stacked seven layers high, and the trailer held another 125.  A pickup truck, loaded ambitiously, held about 50 bales. So this was a lot of loads on a blazing hot day.  We finished just at dark and started the long trip home, back toward civilization, east on Route 7.  The caravan drove slowly (we never tied the loads down in those days).  The whole way home, there were fireworks displays showering and booming on all sides.  

Nowadays, we don't work that hard on the Fourth of July.  We still do whatever needs to be done -- go to markets, pick for the next day, keep the stand going -- but we don't try to do anything hard.  We have a party at the end of the day.

This tradition is well over 30 years old, but it was not our tradition until just three years ago when Jon and I bought Timothy's blueberry patch, along with ten acres that he had bought from my parents in the 1970s.  Timothy planted about 100 bushes in 8 rows and he tended them with the love of a hobby farmer.  He never sold the berries, he just let friends pick them and he had a big Blue-B-Q every year around July 4.  He and Claudine had lots of friends and acquaintances, and those people brought all their cousins and bosses and ex-wives -- their Blue-B-Q became the social event of the season, with 200 guests.

Jon and I are not really that big on parties.  But we wanted to preserve some part of the tradition, so we renamed the event, using a word that my father made up -- pickernic.  It might have a "k" at the end, who knows. A pickernic is a picnic for people who are pickers, not for city people, so to speak.  So it is kind of a company party, in our case.  We invited all of the farmers who live and work on the 400 acres that were originally purchased by the Newcomb-Planck-Moutoux-Graybeal group, and we invited a few other select non-farmers.  The first year, more people came than we invited, because old traditions are hard to stop.  But this year it was just the right number and just the right mix. Plenty of berries for all, plenty of time for good conversations.

It was a rainy, cloudy, unpredictable day so we decided to move the picnic portion indoors to the new barn with the coolers and wash sinks.  Kind of like a reception at Arena Stage -- they just have parties in the hallways between the theaters.  As it happened, it wasn't really raining when it came time to eat, but a level floor and chairs and tables and a roof is not the worst thing for a gathering of 45.  Jon stood at the grill and cranked out piles of barbecue chicken and boiled corn in the big pot that Hall Kern gave us.  The food table was filled with salads and pies and macaroni and cheese -- so much food. Farmers are good eaters, and good providers. 

At the end, there were fireworks to the east and north.  We could see the top third of about six different displays, and we could hear many more to the south.  

I don't miss the days of making hay, but I am glad we have them to compare to these days, so we can have some perspective on how hard we are working.  We still work, but we don't work to the very end of our stamina.  We save some time and energy for other things, like eating and talking with people we really like.