Zephyr is tall and lush, her hair hangs out in big green lobes of vegetative health. Her fruit is long and lean with a delicate yellow body and a sweet green tip. Her babies come in fast and keep coming for weeks, and weeks, and weeks. The flesh of her fruit is tender and delicate with a subtle sweetness. As a mother Zephyr hangs tough when the other squash bend to the Virginia disease cycle. She's not an automatic target for the stripped cucumbers beetles or the squash bugs. Zephyr is sturdy, bodacious, prolific, and a beauty to behold.

Lest this blog start to seem too downtrodden, this week I want to write about the good things. It's summer time! I love it. It's hot, sunny, and full of flavor.

Virginia is an awesome place to farm. We have a long rich season. Spring greens come early and bountifully. You can get cucumbers and tomatoes before June! Fall broccoli thrives. Melons and corn love the heat. With a little luck and persistence, there are few crops we can't grow. However...

This winter I spent all of this time planning. I drafted so many different spreadsheets and hypotheses. I speculated about what people would buy at what quantities and planned crop successions to match my theories. I wrote and revised these plans at least 8 times. Then the season started and I went right to the greenhouse and starting carrying out my plans. Now, we're a few months in and the wheels are in motion, but somehow (no one could have predicted this) reality is a lot different then what I imagined...

This is a learning year. That's what I keep telling myself... So it turns out, we might not have much broccoli to sell this year. But we will have at least one head for dinner tomorrow night, and it has been very hard earned. This is the story of the little broccoli that could.

Why does our lettuce look so beautiful? I don't know, maybe because I sing to it at night? :) More probably (I'm a little bit tone deaf) it is because we condition our soil with lots of dark, rich compost.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Rachel Myers, an organic inspector. She came to survey our land, review our practices, and look through all of our records. She was amazing! Kind, informative, and very thorough. We are pursuing Organic Certification through the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.

Oh weather.. the constant farmer obsession. Perhaps ill advised, I'm trying all of the tricks to push and cajole the weather into cooperating. It's not really working, but I haven't given up yet!

It's officially market season! We had our first two farm stands and farm share pick-ups this week. It was great! So fun to meet all of the people I have been emailing with and seeing on social media these past few weeks. I love putting faces to names and finally getting to make the person-to-food connection that makes this work so worthwhile.