In the bitterly cold, blustery, seemingly endlessly dark winter months when we ached for a glimpse of some blue sky or a blade of green grass, we spent a lot of time fantasizing about our spring garden. We spent countless hours researching gardening designs, investigating types of raised beds, perusing racks of seeds, and reading as much as we could get our hands on about coaxing food from the earth. We bought books, scoured websites, clipped articles, and sent countless e-mail inquiries to various industry experts. We absolutely couldn’t wait for the season to change, for the snow to finally melt away, and the ground to thaw.
Spring came. We gigglingly lugged out our supplies and all of our seeds. We went plant-start and soil shopping. We set up our tumbling composters.
We ended up with a significantly smaller garden than we’d originally planned in the depths of winter … and when really hot weather arrived—along with a bumper crop mosquitoes spawned from nearly two and a half straight months of devastating downpours that left much of our area in soggy ruins—we suddenly found our feverish desire to spend all of our free time out in our garden rapidly dissipating. Sure, we go out every day to check on our (relatively maintenance-free) plants, and we pick the occasional bit of produce, and while we’re of course still very much interested in growing and preserving a good deal of our own food, we’ve realized in the throes of summertime that we aren’t the ambitious gardeners that our sunlight-deprived selves of the past winter believed us to be. (Good thing we didn’t pack up our lives and move to a hotter, sweatier climate just to scratch the gardening itch, hmm?)
So what this means, of course, is that we’ve gotten a bit more clarity and a good reality check about the type of gardening we are really interested in doing, if we’re truly going to be honest with ourselves, which I suppose could be most accurately summed up as “set it and forget it” gardening. Luckily for us, there are a lot of great resources out there about that very sort of thing.
Also luckily for us is that we’re able to support our local farmers, not only through farmers’ markets and roadside stands but also through their CSAs (community-supported agriculture).
Our first experience with a CSA was a number of years ago, and to be honest, it wasn’t a great experience. On the appointed day, we often ended up with vast quantities of vegetables that we couldn’t possibly use up between the two of us before they started to go by … and that was even the produce we really loved. It happened on more than one occasion that we found large amounts of something we just plain couldn’t bear for one reason or another, leaving us to figure out what to do with it. It was somewhat disheartening to realize that we’d prepaid for food that we would never have selected in a grocery store or from a farm stand given the choice.
And then we stumbled upon River Berry Farm, whose CSA has an entirely different model: participants in the CSA get a prepaid card in the amount of their choosing, and with that prepaid card (which includes some bonus funds as a thank-you from the farmers), they can select whatever they’d like to buy—whenever they’d like to buy it—from the farm store. Produce! Cut flowers! Potting soil! Plant starts! It is up to the participants. That was a CSA we could feel good about, so we signed up. And it has been fabulous.
And now in our second year of a CSA with River Berry Farm, we’ve discovered that Savage Gardens also has a similar CSA model, so we’re getting one with them, too. We sincerely hope that more farms adopt that model; it really is so much more serviceable and so much more attractive an option.
Meanwhile, we’ve been putting our CSA and farmers’ markets hauls to excellent use. Cooking is fun again, even in the smoldering, sticky heat of July.
Sauteed carrots with fresh garlic and wild leek blossoms
Roasted new potatoes with scallions and garlic
I keep forgetting to take photographs of the freshly baked bread loaves we’ve been baking; they’re so tantalizing coming right out of the oven that we seem to lose all sense, hacking into it and devouring it with such unadulterated zeal that it is only afterward when we’re left with mangled crumbs does it occur to us that—oops!—yet another loaf ravaged before a single photograph could be taken.
Must … exercise discipline … and … restraint!
Happy, Simple Little Life 