Processing

Shh...don't tell Vanessa she's been blipped again!

This morning we harvested for the local CSA as well as some restaurant and grocery store orders. I like this shot because it shows how much can be going on at once during a harvest. Draining on the table are red Russian and white Russian kale, as well as bunches of yellow and white Swiss chard, and Vanessa is bagging up sugar snap peas. All of these crops are on their last legs actually--the peas have nearly run their course and the most of the greens are bolting, and so becoming bitter. Soon those beds will be mowed, tilled, amended, and planted anew with summer or fall crops.

We grow 4 colors of Swiss chard (yellow, white, magenta, and red) and usually bunch them together to make rainbow chard--a term you may be familiar with from the grocery store. However the restaurant ordering them this morning uses the chard for a pasta dish, and the red and magenta varieties turn the pasta a pink color that its patrons find unsettling, so for them we make bunches of "no-pink-pasta" chard.

After harvest I was tasked with weedwacking a portion of the vineyard. Until yesterday I'd never handled a weedwacker before so that was quite thrilling. Nothing makes one feel more capable than wielding a device with a gas-powered engine attached to it.

For the duration of the afternoon we transplanted into the field some 400 eggplants. I debated blipping them--like all the crops they look so amazing freshly planted in neat rows, their whole lives ahead of them. There's something intensely satisfying about stepping back from a half day's work and looking at all those plants in the ground. Once we have the hot peppers and heirloom tomatoes in, we won't be planting hardly anything, so I'm taking special pleasure in these transplanting days.


For the bird lovers--I snapped a California Quail that was calling from a post in the vineyard this afternoon; Flickr link here.