I keep getting comments about the hockey sticks still in my car. My reply is that you never know when you may find a patch of ice to play on, this is Wisconsin after all. That’s never more true than this season, the coldest wettest spring in my 11 seasons on the farm. Thankfully there isn’t actually any ice around, but I’m still wearing a sweater and winter boots today.
While I always enjoy a good game of hockey, I enjoy the growing season on the farm even more. I love planting vegetables, tending the fields, and most of all sharing our harvests with all our wonderful members. Oh, and I love eating our fresh vegetables too! So I’m getting a little impatient as the cool days linger. Looking around, it seems we are almost a month behind a normal season. The crops look like May crops, not June crops. Most of the large dairy farms only just have corn poking out of the ground, if they even have it planted yet. Asparagus was very slow in coming…and likewise our vegetables just aren’t ready yet like they usually are.
We’ll see what we can get out of the veggie fields over the next couple of weeks, but I don’t think it will be much besides a few greens. Looking around the fields I feel that our summer crops are off to a good start (all planted at opportune times, well weeded and certainly well watered). By next month we will probably be so hot and sweaty all the time that we won’t even remember what it feels like to be cold and to have nothing fresh to eat except spinach. This way of experiencing life on the farm reminds me of my favorite quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
And it will always be that way.
