First I'll take care of some important news.  Our CSA potluck is this weekend!  Join us on the farm on Saturday, July 11th, starting at 6pm for great farm food and company.  Please bring your family, a favorite summer dish to share, your own place settings, chairs or a blanket, and your own alcoholic beverages (if you like).  We'll provide fun farm games, a farm tour, drinks, s'mores (if it's not too hot), and more!

I hope to see you there!  Please reply to this email with any questions you may have about the event.

Now for my newsletter:

Attitude is everything.  Especially on the farm.  Plants have an amazing ability to perceive our energies.  When we're excited, they perk up, when we sing to them, their little cells smile and absorb extra sunlight and their roots plunge for deep nutrients.  When we're down or stressed, they too show signs of stress. 

The question I pose to you today is....is your cup half empty or half
full? 

On the farm, talking about full cups, we look at our great early tomato crop, the luscious edamame, our beautiful flower patch, the carrots that are holding strong in the fields, our successions of buckwheat cover crop in different stages, the cucumber bounty that doesn't quit, okra growing inches daily, eggplant and peppers flowering and looking strong, sweet potatoes vining out and taking over their neatly weeded paths, and the apparent lack of weeds
on the farm (thanks crew and volunteers!!). 

When we look at a half empty cup, we see potatoes that are each half rotten, beets that don't want to grow, a few heirloom tomato varieties that have come down with the dreaded wilt, sporadically germinating melons, and squash that are petering out a little early.

If you ask me, the half full list looks a little more exciting than the half empty list is sad.  Each year on the farm is completely different.  There's no way to predict what will work and what won't...the seasons culminate with a volume of notes to take into account for next seasons planning and planting.  And still, each year we have a diversity of successes and failures.

Funny that last year our successes included garlic and potatoes, the two things that I've often said I grow best (and this year have cooperated the least of all the crops).  I think nature wanted to play a trick on me with the uber wet spring and thwart my root crop pride.  The half full side of that cup is that I've never claimed to grow good fruits, and ladies and gentlemen, jinxes aside, I think this year we're off to a great start.

On to a mouthwatering topic....

The breathtaking BLT.  I must share with you a moment on the farm two weeks ago that almost brought me to tears.  It was magic. 

Last season our first crop of tomatoes was destroyed by tomato fruitworms, so harvesting our first fruits and only culling about 20% of the bounty this year was extra exciting.  I picked the most ripe and beautiful round tomato to take home with me for lunch.  Little did I know the events to follow.  Arriving home for lunch, I found a package on my doorstep.  I hoped, hoped that it would be stained with a smell of salty smoke and with a return address from Tennessee, and folks, it was both.  I tore open the package and found the neatly packed contents: 4 lbs of thick cut, humanely raised, salt cured Benton's bacon (www.bentonshams.com). 

Sparks flew and I was thinking, wow!, we still have lettuces in the field!!  I rushed back to the farm, harvested a crisp head of iceberg lettuce.  The rest can be left to imagination as we created the most amazingly farm fresh BLT I've ever had.  This is the first year I've had the pleasure of mixing lettuces and tomatoes, both from the farm, on a sandwich.  How did we arrive at this grand event?  Thanks to the folks at Johnny's Seeds and our idea that summer can't stop lettuces, we have a few hybrid lettuces that held beautifully even in the dry, hot spell we had in the beginning of the month, and for early tomatoes, we got our act together in our new greenhouse to plant as early as possible. 

So, if I had a picture of this sandwich, I'm sure it would make you weep too.  I beg you all to recreate this event in your own households asap, as our lettuce is now finished till fall!

And lastly, I'll entertain you with some thoughts (thanks Wikepedia) on the Dog Days of Summer.....

The term "Dog Days" was used by the Greeks, as well as the ancient Romans after Sirius (the "Dog Star"), the brightest star in the heavens besides the Sun, not satellite radio.

The Dog Days are the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises just before or at the same time as sunrise, owing to precession of the equinoxes. Ancient Greeks and Romans referred the days of drought and heat as "Dog Days".  At the beginning of the Dog Days, the ancients sacrificed a brown dog to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather, adding to the heat of the sun.

Dog Days were popularly believed to be an evil time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies".

The Old Farmer's Almanac lists the traditional timing of the Dog Days as the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. As we know, these are the days of the year when rainfall is at its lowest levels and the heat starts setting in.

So, please don't go out and sacrifice any brown dog, but do be sun smart!

Thanks for reading!
Paige