Farm Friday, August 4th, 2023
Superior Getaway Week
It is hard being a teacher/farmer. Most of my co-workers at the school can schedule long vacations in the summer. Not me. I am responsible for planting, weeding, and mulching a 4-acre garden during the summer, so we can have something for the students to harvest in the fall when they come back to school. Some items, like onions and garlic, also need to be harvested in the summer. It is a lot.
So it was a rare and glorious week for me to have a whole 5 days off the farm, sharing a cabin on Lake Superior with my in-laws. I ate whitefish and lake trout every day. We went swimming twice in the icy waters of the big lake. I read books and caught up on some genealogy work. We went to a show in the “big top.” I took long naps in the middle of the day. I went shopping! The good life.
I made a list before we left on Monday for our summer garden intern and my co-workers. It was a long list. A lot of weeding and mulching and more weeding and mulching. I’m home now and I took a short walk through the garden. It looks like many items were checked off the list, but they left a few tasks to get to this coming week.
What shocked me was how much the plants grew in 5 days. The warm dry weather pushed the hot-loving crops along. The cucumber and zucchini plants doubled in size. The tomatoes started to ripen (three weeks ahead of schedule!). The flowers are all blooming (also way ahead of schedule). The winter squash is just about ready to harvest.
One of the side effects of a warming planet is that farmers need to learn to anticipate changing growing speeds. A 78 day tomato might become a 62 day tomato. In some cases that might be a good thing. We are a school farm, so we don’t have any markets scheduled until the end of August. The early produce will find homes, but not for money.
The other issue is that some produce tastes better and grows bigger in cold weather. Broccoli needs to be planted in the summer. But if it is too hot in the summer, the broccoli will mature in late August instead of late September. Summer broccoli is bitter and small. As a grower, I need to plant my broccoli for the fall later and later. But I take a chance when I do that, because if it is a “normal” year then it will not mature in time.
In writing news, I keep thinking about essays and not writing them. My muse is about to desert me. I was thinking today about the town we visited on the lake shore. It is an amazing little town, and one of my young friends exclaimed “I love Bayfield!” when he heard I was going there. It got me thinking. What about Bayfield appeals to this low-income kid from the city? There is a lot to love if you are rich. Great restaurants, amazing sailing and kayaking, incredible vacation rentals, unique art, live music, and more.
But what makes a place beloved by a kid who can’t afford any of that? This is the question of what made America great and what could make it great again. I think deliberate thought about common spaces is something that makes a place special. I am not sure there is an essay here, yet.
