Here is our apprentice, Cody, showing some 4th of July spirit amid the potatoes. The crop looks beautiful, wouldn’t you say? Underground they are sizing up nicely, but they still have a ways to go.

Finally we are having gorgeous summery weather. Although it actually feels more like fall with the crisp, clear, cool mornings. All that rain means weeds, weeds, weeds, so the crew has lots of hoeing and hand weeding on the agenda this week. We’re harvesting 4 days a week now, which cuts into the time for all the field work that has to be done. There is still lots of seeding—greens every week until September—and plenty of transplanting too. Sometimes while I sit here on a Sunday morning writing these little notes to you, I scratch my head wondering, didn’t I write the same thing a couple weeks ago.

Well, that is the nature of things around here: We go around and around the same circles and sometimes the circle shrinks a bit when a task is completed (getting in one-time crops like potatoes) or grows a bit as another task starts to demand more time (like harvests).

So here we are with plan for this week that looks a lot like last week: seeding, cultivating, fertilizing, plowing, transplanting, harvesting. And—the best part?—here’s the harvest: beets, turnips, broccoli, lettuce, basil, scallions, thyme, and chard.

Dave’s Note: Tracy’s paragraph above captures the nature of a farmer’s  work beautifully.